Path: ...!news.iecc.com!.POSTED.news.iecc.com!not-for-mail From: John Levine Newsgroups: comp.arch Subject: Re: COBOL, Article on new mainframe use Date: Mon, 19 Aug 2024 03:32:12 -0000 (UTC) Organization: Taughannock Networks Message-ID: References: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Injection-Date: Mon, 19 Aug 2024 03:32:12 -0000 (UTC) Injection-Info: gal.iecc.com; posting-host="news.iecc.com:2001:470:1f07:1126:0:676f:7373:6970"; logging-data="9155"; mail-complaints-to="abuse@iecc.com" In-Reply-To: Cleverness: some X-Newsreader: trn 4.0-test77 (Sep 1, 2010) Originator: johnl@iecc.com (John Levine) Bytes: 2629 Lines: 30 According to Lawrence D'Oliveiro : >> It doesn't require learning concepts that are strange to accountants or >> bookkeepers. > >Level numbers? “USAGE IS COMPUTATIONAL”? “RESERVE «n» ALTERNATE AREAS”, >“ALTER «target» TO PROCEED TO «dest»”? All the fun of the “MOVE” >statement? We all agree ALTER was a mistake, but a lot of this stuff is straightforward to read if a programmer uses it reasonably. Level numbers are not exotic; it's easy enough to see that subfields are part of fields which are part of a record. MOVE by name was pretty slick, something that made it into PL/I but not into C or C++. >Oh, and compound interest requires working with transcendental functions, >doesn’t it? Uh, no, it's just repeated multiplication. COBOL makes it easy to say what the precision of each number is with the decimal point location to get the rounding right. I suppose if you want to compute the APR for a daily compounded rate that's more complicated but not something I'd expect in typical COBOL code, more likely to be an input that's changed when they change the interest rate they charge. If you want bond prices or internal rates of return, you need to compute the zero of a long polynomial which is tedious (I did it for a financial package in the 1980s) but still not transcendental, and in any event, I doubt either were common in the kind of bookkeeping stuff COBOL was typically used for. -- Regards, John Levine, johnl@taugh.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies", Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. https://jl.ly