> COBOL was supposed to be that, no? The use of "magic numbers" as levels in the DATA DIVISION totally blows away any claim that COBOL is English like or understandable to someone without training.
66 foo PIC X(10). 77 bar PIC X(10). 88 baz VALUE "S", "Y". Then there is the weird behavior of COMMENT. In COBOL ends a statement, *except* when that statement is a cooment, in which case it swallows the remainder of the paragraph. Later versions of COBOL introduce a better behaved comment syntax. -- Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz http://mason.gmu.edu/~smetz3 ________________________________________ From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [[email protected]] on behalf of Tony Harminc [[email protected]] Sent: Friday, January 7, 2022 12:42 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: ... Re: Top 8 Reasons for using Python instead of REXX for z/OS On Fri, 7 Jan 2022 at 11:45, Lionel B. Dyck <[email protected]> wrote: > I've been following this thread and one thing that has yet to appear, or I > missed it, has to do with 4GL's and the drive, at one point, for languages > that were more human oriented - those that could be written more like a > normal sentence or phrase, and avoid the technical jargon/gobblygook/syntax. > As I recall in the 1980's there were a few but nothing came of them, instead > we have languages that have their own syntax, and which require extensive > learning but nothing that allows a non-programmer to actually generate a > complex business program. COBOL was supposed to be that, no? Managers could in theory at least read (if not write) a COBOL program and understand what it does, because it so (superficially) resembles English. > From my experience, REXX has many of the 4GL goals as the syntax isn't overly > complex and is something a non-programmer can comprehend rather easily. As > has been previously mentioned in this thread, REXX can be more readily > learned and used than the majority of the current languages. It isn't perfect > but it works very well. Indeed. Tony H. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
