Warp wrote:
>   Looking at COBOL example code, it looks like a mix between INTERCAL and
> LOLCODE. 

Heh.  A bit.  It was supposed to be something you could read. Not unlike 
LOLCODE a bit, but I don't see the connection to INTERCAL except that some 
of the terms are spelled out in prose.

Even reading the COBOL for 99 bottles, I found it difficult to understand. I 
guess COBOL has changed a lot in the last 40 years or so. For example, the 
last COBOL I used you couldn't put the body of the loop near the loop 
control - you had to say "go call that subroutine 99 times" and write the 
subroutine somewhere else. As in the "Cobol typical mainframe" version.

Put it this way, tho. If you knew neither (say) C nor COBOL (to pick 
languages vaguely in the same timeframe), which would be easier to read? If 
you didn't know how to program at all, what would be easy to ready? That was 
one of the design goals for COBOL.

>   (Looking at Fortran examples, it doesn't look any better...)

The FORTRAN 90 looks pretty straightforward. Fortran IV was the last FORTRAN 
I actually did any serious work in, and that looks pretty straightforward, 
if you understand how printf() works in Fortran.

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   There's no CD like OCD, there's no CD I knoooow!

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