Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
> 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?

Cobol has evolved quite a bit.  In its latest incarnation it has built in
support for CICS, XML, Websphere, DB2. It can even talk to Java.  That has to
at least double the number of error messages.

Isaac

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