Warp wrote:

 >  Who ever thought that would be a good idea? Who understands that?

Grace Hopper?

>   So what's the point in having both syntaxes?

Because an awful lot of times, just the one addition or multiplication is 
what you need.

MULTIPLY RETAIL-PRICE BY DISCOUNT-PERCENT GIVING DISCOUNTED-PRICE.
MULTIPLY DISCOUNTED-PRICE BY SALES-TAX-PERCENTAGE GIVING SALES-TAX.
ADD SALES-TAX TO DISCOUNTED-PRICE GIVING TOTAL-DISPLAYED-ON-REGISTER.

It makes it trivially easy to see that the sales tax is applied to the 
discounted price, not the original price, for example.

In all the programs I wrote in 2 years of full time cobol programming, I 
think I used COMPUTE maybe twice?  You almost always need the intermediate 
values anyway, in business calculations.

> people thought that it's cool if you can write "plain English" and have
> the computer understand it. Whether it's actually practical is secondary.

No. It's because the boss can understand stuff like what I wrote above. Just 
like lots of the limitations of early FORTRAN[1] were there to make it 
possible to compile into something as efficient as assembler.

Look at something like a US tax form. The math is all trivial, one operation 
per line.

Scientific computing (a la fortran) didn't work this way for a reason: the 
formulae aren't usually trivial in science, and you usually don't need the 
intermediate values.

[1] Like the fact that there were only a handful of valid expression forms 
you could use for a subscript, because that was the only way to ensure you 
could use these new-fangled index registers.

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

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