On Friday 07/01/2022 at 4:41 pm, Seymour J Metz wrote:
COBOL was supposed to be that, no?
The use of "magic numbers" as levels in the DATA DIVISION totally
blows away any claim that COBOL is English like or understandable to
someone without training.
66 foo PIC X(10).
The syntax of 66 is "66 FOO RENAMES ABLE [THRU DOG]."
77 bar PIC X(10).
88 baz VALUE "S", "Y".
Then there is the weird behavior of COMMENT. In COBOL ends a
statement, *except* when that statement is a cooment, in which case it
swallows the remainder of the paragraph. Later versions of COBOL
introduce a better behaved comment syntax.
That was the original NOTE statement replaced in later versions with
of COBOL using * in column 7 for comment lines. I believe that there
are further developments in the 2002 and 2014 standards that give
other options which IBM may have implemented.
Clark Morris
--
Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz
http://mason.gmu.edu/~smetz3
________________________________________
From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [[email protected]] on
behalf of Tony Harminc [[email protected]]
Sent: Friday, January 7, 2022 12:42 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: ... Re: Top 8 Reasons for using Python instead of REXX
for z/OS
On Fri, 7 Jan 2022 at 11:45, Lionel B. Dyck <[email protected]> wrote:
I've been following this thread and one thing that has yet to appear,
or I missed it, has to do with 4GL's and the drive, at one point, for
languages that were more human oriented - those that could be written
more like a normal sentence or phrase, and avoid the technical
jargon/gobblygook/syntax. As I recall in the 1980's there were a few
but nothing came of them, instead we have languages that have their
own syntax, and which require extensive learning but nothing that
allows a non-programmer to actually generate a complex business
program.
COBOL was supposed to be that, no? Managers could in theory at least
read (if not write) a COBOL program and understand what it does,
because it so (superficially) resembles English.
From my experience, REXX has many of the 4GL goals as the syntax isn't
overly complex and is something a non-programmer can comprehend rather
easily. As has been previously mentioned in this thread, REXX can be
more readily learned and used than the majority of the current
languages. It isn't perfect but it works very well.
Indeed.
Tony H.
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