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From: anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at (Anton Ertl)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: text in programming languages, Unicode in strings
Date: Sun, 19 May 2024 15:52:49 GMT
Organization: Institut fuer Computersprachen, Technische Universitaet Wien
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John Levine <johnl@taugh.com> writes:
>According to Anton Ertl <anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at>:
>>A similar concept was implemented in COBOL, where the designers though
>>that having to write
>>
>>ADD A TO B GIVING C
>>
>>or somesuch makes programming easier than writing
>>
>>C = A+B
>>
>>in FORTRAN. ...
>
>That's a common misconception. The point of having COBOL look like
>English wasn't to make it easier to program but to make it easier for
>non-programmers to read. Think of an auditor looking at the program to
>see if its business logic matches what the company says it does.

That may have been the idea, but I think the idea was wrong.  People
learn in primary school what + means.  Variables are somewhat later,
but COBOL does not spare auditors from understanding those.  The case
of = is interesting in that FORTRAN's usage is decidedly
non-mathematical in statements such as

I = I+1

However, my experience is that beginning programmers have no problems
understanding the idea of imperative programming (less than e.g.,
understanding the use of = in Prolog which is much more mathematical)
and assignments even after many years of being taught with the use of
= for equations.

In any case, I think that even an auditor who does not know
programming at all will find the FORTRAN syntax for a computation like
the one above easier to read than the COBOL syntax once he has to read
more than a dozen such statements.  Hasn't COBOL also included a more
mathematically oriented way of writing computations?

- anton
-- 
'Anyone trying for "industrial quality" ISA should avoid undefined behavior.'
  Mitch Alsup, <c17fcd89-f024-40e7-a594-88a85ac10d20o@googlegroups.com>