Loyd:
Fort Wauchooka (sp??) rings a bell somewhere in my cob ridden
memory. But I also now remember Ft Ben Harrison (now). I remember the
guys talking about the desert and thats about all.
Ed
On Apr 17, 2012, at 7:17 AM, Lloyd Fuller wrote:
In 1969, and until sometime in the 1970s or later, the Army
programming school
was at Fort Benjamin Harrison in Indiana.
Graduated in March 1969 as a Staff Sergeant converted to a SP6.
Programming
since then.
lLOYD
----- Original Message ----
From: Ed Gould <[email protected]>
To: [email protected]
Sent: Tue, April 17, 2012 12:16:33 AM
Subject: Re: GO TO "cobol"
On Apr 16, 2012, at 8:34 AM, McKown, John wrote:
----------------SNIP---------------------------------
Also remember that COBOL, at least originally, was supposed to be
very
English-like and so usable by people at the Army PFC level of
training.
--John McKown
Systems Engineer IV
IT
Hmmm... I was in the Army and we got PFC's from the programming
school (AZ? its
been 40 years so forgive me). We had two groups, one COBOL (batch
processing)
and one ASM group (essentially sysprogs). The ASM group was by far
the best IMO.
I was on call quite often and had to "fix" the cobol programs that
went boom in
the middle of the night. The COBOL people were semi useless in
debugging and
when I looked at the code they had produced (except for a few
people) it was
hopeless to understand. I spent more time trying to figure out the
logic and
compare what I was seeing in the dump. 1/3 the time I helped the
programmer
figure out where his problem was and supplying answers to his
questions on what
was in this field or that field.
What was interesting was that as the guys (no female programmers so
don't call
me sexist blame the Army not me) as they became more experienced
the code became
easier to follow. As they became became better programmers there
were less logic
problems. Now having said that most of the programs were smallish
and only a
few were considered large so the smallish programs there was no
excuse for logic
issues or mangled code. My memory is foggy here as to goto's but I
think the
"rule" no standards if memory serves me that goto's were to be
minimized as a
result flow was easier to follow and frankly debugging was easier.
Ed
ps: We had one person who at the time he was drafted was working
for IBM and he
privately told me about some OS enhancements that when I first
heard I couldn't
wrap my head around as virtual (at least that I had never heard of)
was a
nightmare that I couldn't wrap my head around. After I got out of
the Army (2
years) IBM announced Virtual and I was able to ask some semi
intelligent
questions as my "preview" and the questions helped jump start by job.
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