On 4/5/20 7:24 AM, Bill Gunshannon via cctalk wrote: > Yet another article loaded with BS denigrating COBOL. > The product of a very flawed academic system that decided > to destroy COBOL because its users refused to accept that > academics know what's best for the industry.
COBOL was remarkable in several respects. Structured records being one of them. (FLOW-MATIC was actually a bit superior in that the record structure information was separate from the program). Strong data typing was another one. Grace Hopper did a remarkable job keeping the CODASYL show together, long before ANSI took an interest in standardizing languages. On the other hand, there's always PL/I--a language for everybody and nobody. Be ye FORTRAN, COBOL or Algol programmer, you can, like Burger King, have it your way. A co-worker from IBM once told me that the original IBM PL/I committee was a band of misfits. --Chuck
