There is an additional draw back regarding the language Cobol itself: At the times, it was designed in the fifties, it fitted well into the technical architecture of the machines, though it was rather primitive from a modern viewpoint. The aim was to enable people with a business background (office clerks and accountants) to write programs without demanding computer science skills (which did not really exist in the fifties).
The technical evolution of hardware and OS led to growing customer demands that fitted not really perfectly into the original design. The language evolved despite its primary limitations and grew more and more complex due to those limitations. That’s the current situation. Compared to PL/I, which first appeared in 1964, writing large scale software is much more difficult. I myself must admit that I'm an enthusiastic PL/I-programmer. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
