Path: ...!2.eu.feeder.erje.net!3.eu.feeder.erje.net!feeder.erje.net!eternal-september.org!feeder3.eternal-september.org!news.eternal-september.org!.POSTED!not-for-mail From: Lawrence D'Oliveiro Newsgroups: comp.arch Subject: Re: Article on new mainframe use Date: Fri, 16 Aug 2024 02:05:27 -0000 (UTC) Organization: A noiseless patient Spider Lines: 23 Message-ID: References: <3f8sbj9chugcr6arbpck2t7nb0g87ff6ik@4ax.com> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Injection-Date: Fri, 16 Aug 2024 04:05:28 +0200 (CEST) Injection-Info: dont-email.me; posting-host="fe72d36c65c5a55eac1ba2ec475c4532"; logging-data="1235657"; mail-complaints-to="abuse@eternal-september.org"; posting-account="U2FsdGVkX1+p3+9rStnY0PBvyaM7EuUX" User-Agent: Pan/0.159 (Vovchansk; ) Cancel-Lock: sha1:tcibIc1cU6ZfX6PvPvZudoM3KkQ= Bytes: 2313 On Thu, 15 Aug 2024 22:06:16 +0300, Niklas Holsti wrote: > Dewar used to say that COBOL is the "Rodney Dangerfield of programming > languages", which just "don't get no respect". Except people laughed *with* Rodney Dangerfield, whereas they laugh *at* COBOL. For Dangerfield, it was just an act, after all: you don’t think his real life was like that, do you? COBOL was designed specifically for “business” computing, back when there was a clearly demarcation of what this meant: no need for complex mathematical formulae, no need for string/text manipulation, no need for interactive terminals. One major crack in this wall came with the introduction of relational DBMSes, particularly ones using SQL as their interface language: suddenly, the use of such databases became very much a core “business” need. The best way to interface to such a DBMS was to be able to generate SQL strings on the fly; but this required some facility with manipulation of dynamic, variable-length strings, which COBOL completely lacked. And so special extensions were tacked on, just to cope with the generation of SQL queries and templates.