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From: The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid>
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers,comp.os.linux.misc
Subject: Re: The joy of FORTRAN
Date: Sat, 28 Sep 2024 09:12:02 +0100
Organization: A little, after lunch
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On 28/09/2024 08:18, 186282@ud0s4.net wrote:
> On 9/27/24 4:38 PM, Charlie Gibbs wrote:
>> On 2024-09-27, geodandw <geodandw@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> On 9/27/24 13:43, Charlie Gibbs wrote:
>>>
>>>> On 2024-09-27, geodandw <geodandw@gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> Cobol was also very portable.
>>>>
>>>> As long as your destination compiler supports COMP-3.  :-)
>>>
>>> Or your source computer didn't have COMP-3, or if you didn't use it.
>>
>> I was once called in to optimize a CPU-bound COBOL program.
>> The genius who wrote it declared all subscripts as COMP-3.
>> Changing them to COMP-4 knocked 30% off the execution time.
> 
>    Did COBOL even HAVE real "types" ???
> 
>    It was not really a "sophisticated" language.
>    It was MEANT mostly for biz/commercial apps,
>    esp financial and scheduling. It was GOOD at
>    that - except for being TOO ugly/confusing in
>    the chase to be "simple/self-documenting".
> 
>    I don't hate COBOL - it HAD/HAS its place.
>    However the real-world implementation could
>    never live-up to "The Vision".
> 
>    COBOL could/can be "improved" - made more
>    efficient. But NOBODY is gonna DO that
>    these days. As such COBOL kinda becomes
>    like 'Latin' - an unchanging 'dead' lang.
>    This MAY be a good thing.
> 
COBOL was massively good at what it did, and what it still does.

Batch processing  *enormous* quantities of data with a few small routines.

It was designed for and on machines with very small memories, initially 
core store, but very large data sets stored on hard drives or tapes, and 
is massively efficient at utilising that. 64k of RAM and a z80 was a 
luxury for COBOL

Its ideas about data organisation led to the relational database.  And 
thence SQL and friends

A subject about which most people here know very little.

Analysing businesses and writing code to streamline their operations is 
a different art  to network programming. *All* the hard work is in the 
analysis and initial data definitions and structures.

Back in the day the lowliest part of that process was the 'coder' who 
simply turned the specs into clean COBOL ....:-)



-- 
The theory of Communism may be summed up in one sentence: Abolish all 
private property.

Karl Marx