I suspect that the COBOL code you're referring to was crippled by poorly-chosen identifiers. Even the most readable language can be made inscrutable by (im)prudent choice of variable names. :-)
Leslie Turriff State of Missouri Information Technology Services Division -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of McKown, John Sent: Wednesday, November 02, 2011 13:53 To: [email protected] Subject: Re: SLightly O/T Perl It's better than APL. And depends on the coder not using weird idioms. I've seen COBOL which is incomprehensible. IIRC, COBOL was supposedly designed so that an English speaking army private could write "clean" code. Which simply proves that programmers can't speak English (properly). -- John McKown Systems Engineer IV ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
