Without the GO TO, Grace Hopper might have been forever stuck in Japan. Many years ago, I was at an ACM meeting where Grace Hopper was a speaker. One of the stories she told was of a visit to a data center in Japan. Somehow, she was left there without an interpretter. The folks at the data center spoke no English and she spoke no Japanese. Fortunately, the programmers knew COBOL. And while COBOL was designed so that the english commands could be easily translated into other languages (in most languages, the verb in a command is the first thing in the sentence), this is almost never done. Her solution was simple. She poiinted at herself, then said GO TO and the name of the hotel. This was enoungh so that the programmers were able to get her to the hotel.
Jeff Holst ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
