On 12/12/2015 06:13 PM, Eric Christopherson wrote:
On Sat, Dec 12, 2015, Fred Cisin wrote:
you could feed the cards through an INTERPRETER, which printed the card
content on the card.
[snip]
For many years, I kept around a plug-board labelled "COBOL INTERPRETER",
just to prove that a COBOL interpreter was possible :-)
Are you using "interpreter" in two senses here, or just one? That is to
say, I'm not sure if you're saying the "COBOL interpreter" was just a
program that printed COBOL source on a punched card, or if you mean it
actually ran the program.
I'm pretty sure this was a joke based on the meaning of the
word interpreter. If he could have actually run an
arbitrary COBOL program, with named variables and
conditional branching on a plugboard-based accounting
machine, I think IBM would have been VERY interested in
hiring him! (Or possibly having him dumped in a nearby body
of water with concrete overshoes.)
Jon
