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From: Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid>
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers,comp.os.linux.misc
Subject: Re: The joy of FORTRAN
Date: Sun, 29 Sep 2024 05:36:03 -0000 (UTC)
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On Sun, 29 Sep 2024 04:26:10 GMT, Charlie Gibbs wrote:

> On 2024-09-27, Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote:
> 
>> On Fri, 27 Sep 2024 20:38:38 GMT, Charlie Gibbs wrote:
>>
>>> 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 you just change
>>
>>    DEFINE TYPE COMP AS COMP-3
>>
>> to
>>
>>    DEFINE TYPE COMP as COMP-4
>>
>> and that would take effect everywhere that COMP was used?
>>
>> Oh, wait, COBOL didn’t have typedefs ...
> 
> I suppose I could have done the equivalent of s/COMP-3/COMP-4/ in the
> text editor of the day, but that would have also changed the fields that
> were not only legitimately COMP-3, but which could not have been held in
> a COMP-4 variable.
> 
> Sometimes you just gotta Do the Right Thing, no matter how long it
> takes.

Helps if you are charging by the hour. ;)