>From Jed:
> I did not know Grace Hopper but no one contributed more to software than she > did. She was an admiral in the Navy. Back around 1980 when I still had a few visible fledgling feathers I got to see Grace Hopper at a talk she gave in Madison on one of her numerous speaking engagement rounds. One of the first things she did after she stepped up to the podium was to apologize about what happened to COBOL. The audience was packed with COBOL mainframe programmers, myself included. Her apology got a chuckle, particularly from the smaller group of us that had been exposed to other programming languages. I think the rest probably just scratched their heads and wondered what she was apologizing for. I certainly do not blame Grace and the monumental task that had been handed to her to develop the first business oriented programming language known as COBOL. Love it or hate it, COBOL is still one of the most widely used 3rd generation programming languages in the mainframe environment. Being the first business oriented programming language of its kind, Grace and her team had no prior experience in comprehending how such a programming language should be structured. Since they were trying to design a simple-to-understand programming language syntax that performed a lot of business oriented accounting activities it seemed to make sense to develop commands around the English language, using simple grammatically correct English-like sentences, like "ADD SALES-TAX-VALUE TO GRAND-TOTAL." (Don't forget that period!) Of course you could write the same computation in COBOL as "COMPUTE GRAND-TOTAL = GRAND-TOTAL + SALES-TAX-VALUE." which was just as bad because of its wordiness. Developing the excessively worded commands that many computer science academics turned their noses up at wasn't her fault or the team's fault. Eventually, I would imagine the whole team learned what worked and what didn't through trial and error and getting feed-back from users. But by then COBOL standards had already been set in stone, and there was no going back. You had to respect the Admiral. Regards, Steven Vincent Johnson OrionWorks.com zazzle.com/orionworks
