Path: ...!news.mixmin.net!eternal-september.org!feeder3.eternal-september.org!news.eternal-september.org!.POSTED!not-for-mail From: Terje Mathisen Newsgroups: comp.arch Subject: Re: COBOL, Article on new mainframe use Date: Fri, 23 Aug 2024 10:32:25 +0200 Organization: A noiseless patient Spider Lines: 49 Message-ID: References: <61a50eac95ff8fa39af47f03daa885d0@www.novabbs.org> <20240823112029.00002202@yahoo.com> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable Injection-Date: Fri, 23 Aug 2024 10:32:25 +0200 (CEST) Injection-Info: dont-email.me; posting-host="a8d9203f758e80cc85c2cc48bf7cf1d4"; logging-data="903630"; mail-complaints-to="abuse@eternal-september.org"; posting-account="U2FsdGVkX1/Gd4UciavsN6A6AUrw+Mp6m9yAoGU92XNMHszuGLmlug==" User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:91.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/91.0 SeaMonkey/2.53.18.2 Cancel-Lock: sha1:ZAE5hl+w/rtsh34TJATgrWbB/Wg= In-Reply-To: <20240823112029.00002202@yahoo.com> Bytes: 2828 Michael S wrote: > On Fri, 23 Aug 2024 09:40:00 +0200 > Terje Mathisen wrote: >=20 >> MitchAlsup1 wrote: >>> On Sun, 18 Aug 2024 18:21:00 +0000, John Dallman wrote: >>> =20 >>>> =C2=A0=C2=A0=C2=A0=C2=A0=C2=A0=C2=A0=C2=A0=C2=A0=C2=A0=C2=A0=C2=A0=C2= =A0=C2=A0 I had a basic COBOL course at college in 1980-81, and >>>> became quite clear that this wasn't what I wanted to do. >>>> >>>> John >>> >>> So, John is not a COBOholic !! >> >> Also not a COBOL fan, mostly due to the verbosity. >> >> I once ported a COBOL-specific algorithm to Pascal, which meant that >> I had to reimplement code for all the 80-col punch card formatted IO >> as well as sorting according to quite special rules. >> >> The original was 25 pages, my replacement ~5, at least half of which >> was the COBOL specific function replacements, so the mainline code >> became an order of magnitude smaller. >> >> Terje >> >=20 > What would be the size if you were porting it from COBOL to COBOL ? >=20 Huh? Are you asking about optimizing the COBOL to be much less verbose? I have absolutely no idea where I would even have started such a task, I = just looked at the actual source code, while already knowing _what_ it=20 was doing, and then figured out how to reimplement it in a different=20 language. It is quite possible that the original COBOL was non-optimal, but I=20 still have no way to determine that. Terje --=20 - "almost all programming can be viewed as an exercise in caching"