On 8/1/22 1:42 am, Tony Harminc wrote:
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.
It's interesting that no language since COBOL has ever tried to emulate
the "english" syntax. It turns out that it was not actually a terribly
good idea. Programmers preferred languages with more concise syntax.
BTW, I'm not knocking COBOL. I'm a mainframe guy and I'm cognizant to
the fact that the raison d'être of the mainframe is to run applications
written in COBOL. PL/I programmers will disagree but COBOL is king.
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.
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