Warp wrote:
>   I don't know if it's just that I have been exposed way too much to the
> C family of languages 

I think that's it. As I said, one of the original design goals was that 
non-programmers could read it.  It's pretty straightforward what each 
individual sentence does. The overall structure is obscured in the way you 
say, in part due to the verbosity making it spread much bigger, and in part 
due to the lack of familiar control structures, indenting, etc.

>   Maybe it's the lack of delimiters. It's difficult to see where logical
> code blocks begin and end when there are no visually distinguishing delimiter
> symbols. Not even indentation to make them stand out (such as eg. in Python).

Yeah. On the other hand, lots of COBOL programs tend to not have a whole lot 
of deep structure in them, in my very limited experience. One tends to 
structure 30 programs with bunches of intermediate files rather than one 
program with 30 subroutines nesting 5 deep.  Not unlike shell scripting, sorta.

Of course, it's from before structured programming, let alone before OO or 
anything like that, so yeah, it's going to have funky control structures. 
Altho I did see a book on object-oriented COBOL sitting on a shelf not too 
long ago.

>   Probably a question of getting accustomed to the syntax.

That too.  The data declarations are pretty cool for a business language, 
tho. Lots of the older machines had hardware support for COBOL data types, 
back when doing things like printf() or decimal arithmetic in software was 
prohibitively slow.

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

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