Re: [Nolug] Evo and Outlook

On Mon, 2003-07-14 at 09:43, Judson Lester wrote:
> On Friday, July 11, 2003, at 06:11 PM, Ron Johnson wrote:
>
> > On Fri, 2003-07-11 at 14:43, rbstrickland@cox.net wrote:
> >>> Thanks. I wonder how many of these vulnerabilities would be elim-
> >>> inated if most programmers stopped using C, and went to pointerless
> >>> languages (everything from Python, BASIC, Java and Lisp/workalikes,
> >>> all the way to COBOL, Ada and FORTRAN) for most work.
> >>
> >> I understand the point you're making, but COBOL does have pointers,
> >
> > Yes, COBOL-99 does, but no one really uses it. COBOL-85 is *the*
> > 3GL business language.
>
> Blah. COBOL is a ledger book with an attitude.

Bull.

It is a language tuned to a record-oriented paradigm (and that
means records in all their forms, including embedded variable
length arrays), but so what? Many things in commerce have that
orientation. That's why COBOL-85 is so damned useful.

When I was in college, the way I learned COBOL-74 made everyone
in the classroom *despise* it, because it made us go through
such incredible contortions to avoid GOTO (Dijkstra's evil
legacy) in a language that doesn't have ENDIF or DO-WHILE.

I was mortified when my first programming job was using COBOL-74.
Boy, did I learn some things!! GOTO and 35 neurons along with
use of "PERFORM 200-BEGIN-PROCESSING THROUGH 200-EXIT." makes
COBOL-74 very powerful.

Then came COBOL-85, which has all the modern control structures,
and is a totally sweet language for writing form- and record-
oriented apps.

-- 
+-----------------------------------------------------------+
| Ron Johnson, Jr.     Home: ron.l.johnson@cox.net          |
| Jefferson, LA  USA   http://members.cox.net/ron.l.johnson |
|                                                           |
| 4 degrees from Vladimir Putin
+-----------------------------------------------------------+
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