Wapsi Square Forum

Atomic wrote:

Fairportfan wrote:Admiral Grace was a wonderful computer person ... but COBOL is a blot on her escutcheon.

And the alternative was what? Fortran?

Even if there was no alternative, COBOL is a badly-designed language. A friend of mine who was on the committee that wrote the ANSI SQL standard once pointed out that the COOL standard does not require the computer that runs it to be able to accurately add 2 + 2 and get 4.

I don't know anyone who's had much to do with it that doesn't, to a greater or lesser degree, hate it.

About its only good point, these days, is that there are an amazing number of legacy systems that still use it ... and if you know how to maintain it, it's good job security.

Fairportfan wrote:

Atomic wrote:

Fairportfan wrote:Admiral Grace was a wonderful computer person ... but COBOL is a blot on her escutcheon.

And the alternative was what? Fortran?

Even if there was no alternative, COBOL is a badly-designed language. A friend of mine who was on the committee that wrote the ANSI SQL standard once pointed out that the COOL standard does not require the computer that runs it to be able to accurately add 2 + 2 and get 4.

I don't know anyone who's had much to do with it that doesn't, to a greater or lesser degree, hate it.

About its only good point, these days, is that there are an amazing number of legacy systems that still use it ... and if you know how to maintain it, it's good job security.

So Pentium users could have a field day with COBAL?

Fairportfan wrote:

Atomic wrote:

Fairportfan wrote:Admiral Grace was a wonderful computer person ... but COBOL is a blot on her escutcheon.

And the alternative was what? Fortran?

Even if there was no alternative, COBOL is a badly-designed language.

One word is sufficient to summarize COBOL's badness: ALTER.

FORTRAN had the equivalent, I'm afraid: ASSIGN. Deleted from the language in FORTRAN 95 (to no person's regret as far as I can tell).

Debugging a program which used these constructs usually required a complete source listing, a flowchart the size of a squash court, state-transition diagrams written in at least fourteen spatial dimensions, complete collections of the entire input to the program, memory dumps, machine register dumps, days of painful effort, direct intercession by the gods, and more luck than any six people could count on having in their entire lives.

And when you consider that, this wonderful internet that we all converse upon daily is billions of times more amazing.

jwhouk wrote:And when you consider that, this wonderful internet that we all converse upon daily is billions of times more amazing.

If you really want to give your mind something to wrap itself around how about that the computer has evolved hundreds of times faster than the whole history of human communications.

Mark N wrote:If you really want to give your mind something to wrap itself around how about that the computer has evolved hundreds of times faster than the whole history of human communications.

"A brain the size of a planet, and they use me to animate LOLcats. I'm so depressed..."

Dave wrote:

Mark N wrote:If you really want to give your mind something to wrap itself around how about that the computer has evolved hundreds of times faster than the whole history of human communications.

"A brain the size of a planet, and they use me to animate LOLcats. I'm so depressed..."

Fairportfan wrote:

Dave wrote:

Mark N wrote:If you really want to give your mind something to wrap itself around how about that the computer has evolved hundreds of times faster than the whole history of human communications.

"A brain the size of a planet, and they use me to animate LOLcats. I'm so depressed..."

I am surprised there isn't an xkcd rule somewhere, as he's covered just about everything...