I once saw a PL/I programmer that somebody had compressed by removing all white space not required by the language. I never understood why anybody would do such a thing to a poor inoffensive program that never did any harm to anybody.
I don't like COBOL, and the claim that it is English-like is ridiculous, but to blame the language for lack of documentation, lack of configuration control, skinflint management and rampant understaffing is ludicrous. Nor is it rational to judge the language by the CODASYL definition; it's changed a lot. Is it self documenting? No. Does it prevent the programmer from writing helpful comments? Also no. The same with C. I dislike the language for many reasons, but I have founds myself defending the idiom "for(;;)" from what I considered unenlightened criticism. On the flip side, I like REXX, but that didn't stop me from writing an article on it's pitfalls and how to avoid them. I even gave a nod to the SIGNAL ON NOVALUE contingent, although I disagree with them. -- Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz http://mason.gmu.edu/~smetz3 ________________________________________ From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [[email protected]] on behalf of Tony Thigpen [[email protected]] Sent: Thursday, July 16, 2020 10:46 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: OOBOL and English was Re: Still COBOL After All These Years? I agree with Clark. In addition, even the best language can have it's best features ignored by programmers so that others can claim it's the language's fault. I have seen both REXX and C code that was totally unreadable due to the programmer putting 24 nested functions in one statement. I have seen COBOL code that is unreadable because the programmer used cryptic variable names are very complex IF comparisons. I even saw one COBOL program where the variables were all in Spanish in a shop in North Alabama where there was only one programmer that spoke Spanish within 100 miles. Totally unreadable by the guy that followed him (me). Don't blame the language. Blame the management that allowed programmers to write code that was not readable by the next guy. I used to work for a large software development firm that had strict standards. This was before even dial-up. Most new programmers fussed about the programming standards. Until, they got a support call at 3am and had to debug a program over the phone with the customer reading the COBOL source to them. Taking a little longer to code, and typing a little more, cost very little but added a lot of ease to the back end when it came to support. Tony Thigpen Clark Morris wrote on 7/16/20 10:16 PM: > [Default] On 16 Jul 2020 10:34:40 -0700, in bit.listserv.ibm-main > [email protected] (Seymour J Metz) wrote: > >> The claim that COBOL is English like is every bit as bogus as the claim that >> rewriting existing COBOL applications in another language will magically fix >> problems of underfunding, understaffing and general mismanagement. > > Looking at some of the comment I have seen in Assembler code including > my own, COBOL code is close to the syntax of those comments. > > Clark Morris >> >> BTW, when the language du jour is out of fashion, will they want to rewrite >> the application again, with the same pretext? And will they ensure that this >> time they have adequate documentation and adequate configuration control? > > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, > send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
