Then apparently the sites that you worked at were not worried about CPU time or disk space. When I was writing COBOL programs in the same time frame, we had to justify leaving numbers as character. Character numbers were just too expensive to manipulate and too expensive to store on disk. 2314s were not cheap. :-)
Lloyd >________________________________ > From: Tom Marchant <[email protected]> >To: [email protected] >Sent: Wednesday, March 26, 2014 9:42 AM >Subject: Re: Another Article On Lagging Mainframe Skills > > >On Wed, 26 Mar 2014 08:24:09 -0400, Tony Thigpen wrote: > >>Now, as to COBOL, we normally deal with non-text based numbers. >>Everything in the file is stored packed or binary, not as text. > >Really? That isn't my experience. I worked as a Cobol programmer >for about seven years in the early 1970's and what I remember is >that there was a lot of data stored in the files that was character >data. > >I have never had the need to do anything with regular expressions, >so I never learned how to use them. Still, I don't understand the >animosity that some seem to have toward them. > >-- >Tom Marchant > > >
