[Coco] obscure programming languages was Re: books

[Roger Merchberger]

Rumor has it that Mark McDougall may have mentioned these words:

>I was *forced* to study COBOL in my Computer Science degree back in '84.

Yes, COBOL is verbose - but I liked it - I attribute that more than 
anything else to the fact that I can now type 110wpm! ;-)

COBOL's "PICT" statements made it a *lot* easier for report printing than 
diddling with BASIC's TAB()/POS() functions and using commas & semicolons 
in LPRINT statements. Report writing in BASIC *sucked*.

Also, one main thing that no-one's mentioned yet: The reason COBOL survived 
as long as it did is because all of it's math functions were done in BCD, 
not "normal" floating-point, so there's no rounding snafus WRT the math... 
very impotent when it comes to banking.

>BTW did I mention I don't like COBOL? ;)

IMHO, yes, overall... COBOL sucked. It sucked almost as much as almost 
everything else out there, tho... ;-) Giving credit where credit was due, 
COBOL is/was a very *logical* language. When written right, it was pretty 
much self-documenting and very easy to debug.

I borrowed an RPG handbook from a buddy of mine... I gave it back to him 
the next day and said: "I love learning new things; but I don't love it 
*THAT* much!" :-)

Would I run either on a CoCo? Noper, not even close! I'd rather program in 
assembly!

Nowadays, tho, for report writing I'd much rather use Perl, and for my 
general "gotta make it work *now*" programming (including GUI) Python is 
"da bomb." Report writing in Python isn't bad either; still much better 
than COBOL.

Ah well... back to (pfft) work, or at least the appearance of it! ;-)

Laterz,
Roger "Merch" Merchberger

--
Roger "Merch" Merchberger   | Anarchy doesn't scale well. -- Me
zmerch at 30below.com.         |
SysAdmin, Iceberg Computers