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From: "Stephen Fuld" <SFuld@alumni.cmu.edu.invalid>
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: ALTER, ASSIGN and labels-as-values (was: Unicode in strings)
Date: Tue, 28 May 2024 16:54:36 -0000 (UTC)
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John Levine wrote:

> According to Stephen Fuld <SFuld@alumni.cmu.edu.invalid>:
> > As I said before, you could easily scan the source code and find all
> > the ALTER statements ...
> 
> Hm, I'm guessing you've never dropped a box containing 2000 source
> cards.


I have (remember using a marker to put a diagonal line across the top
of the deck to make it easier to spot an out of order card?  :-(.  But
that isn't the point.  When I said scan, I was referring to the paper
listings that, in the day, were easily available.




> COBOL dates from about 1960, while online text editors, as opposed to
> coding forms and keypunches, didn't become common until the 1970s and
> in some places even later.

Sure, but paper listings were available long before online text
editors.  That is what I used, circa early 1970s.

 
> It really mattered that it was obvious that a Fortran assigned GOTO
> could go anywhere, but in COBOL an altered GOTO looked just like an
> unaltered one.

While I suppose you could code a paragraph with only a GOTO statement,
(required syntax for the ALTERable GOTO), I see no reason to, so while
the GOTO statement itself was syntactically identical to a non
ALTERable GOTO, the fact that it was in a paragraph by itself made it
unique in the source code listing.


> 
> Dunno why COBOL didn't have label variables instead.  It wouldn't
> have been any harder.

I don't know either. 


Note that I am absolutely not arguing that ALTER GOTO was a good idea.
I am just responding to John's assertion that putting it in the
language was "irresponsible", because a programmer could "hide"
malicious code.

While I suppose any feature that makes code harder to comprehend makes
it easier to hide malicious code, John presented no evidence that
anyone ever did this, and I suspect that "easier to hide malicious
code" was not among the most important reasons for the feature's
deprecation.



-- 
 - Stephen Fuld 
(e-mail address disguised to prevent spam)