Invisible wrote:
> don't know much about COBOL myself. All I heard is "if you miss out one 
> dot, the compiler will report an error message 800 lines later".

Well, I can tell you that if you spell it "IDNETIFICATION DIVISION" on 
the first line, you'll get 700 error messages on a 300-line program. ;-)

COBOL wasn't bad for its time. It's wordy because everything is line 
oriented, and it was supposed to be easy for non-programmers to read, 
and a 32K machine with 4 meg of disk space and milisecond cycle times 
was a high-end mainframe.

There's no dynamic layout or allocation of memory. operating systems 
weren't nearly as uniform as they are today.

(COBOL has evolved, of course, but I'm talking in the 60's versions.)

> (I don't know whether that's true or not, but any programming language 
> where beginners might realistically write an 800 line program worries me!)

It was, IIRC, some 350 lines to write a program to look through the 
employee file and calculate and print how many days each employee had 
been employed, in descending order. COBOL was pretty darn verbose.

A great deal of that was boilerplate, of course, identifying the 
program, naming the files it used and the layouts of their records, etc 
etc etc. The actual body of the code was probably 100 lines.

-- 
Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)
  Ever notice how people in a zombie movie never already know how to
  kill zombies? Ask 100 random people in America how to kill someone
  who has reanimated from the dead in a secret viral weapons lab,
  and how many do you think already know you need a head-shot?

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