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From: Terje Mathisen <terje.mathisen@tmsw.no>
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: text in programming languages, Unicode in strings
Date: Sun, 19 May 2024 16:32:29 +0200
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MitchAlsup1 wrote:
> David Schultz wrote:
> 
>> On 5/18/24 12:16 PM, John Levine wrote:
>>> 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.
>>>
>> It certainly didn't make it easier for people learning to use it.
> 
>> I remember way back in my undergrad days, when keypunch was king, that 
>> every semester at some point someone would hang out a shingle: COBOL 
>> Help Desk.
> 
>> Never saw the equivalent for FORTRAN, etc.
> 
> I, myself, played the Fortran part. But, instead of having a help desk,
> I could do almost anything a Fortran programmer wanted over a
> telephone.
> I was sitting over my soldering bench disassembling a stereo, and
> teaching
> a person how to do a simple sort program while repairing a stereo
> amplifier.

Reminds me of talking to a Hydro guy in southern Iran, close to the Iraq 
border, who had a non-bootable laptop. I was able to tell him on the 
phone how to run debug to load the master boot record and hex-edit it to 
make it bootable again and then write it back, without seeing his screen 
at any point.

Terje

-- 
- <Terje.Mathisen at tmsw.no>
"almost all programming can be viewed as an exercise in caching"