Re: [Nolug] Evo and Outlook

On Tue, 2003-07-15 at 09:32, Judson Lester wrote:
> On Monday, July 14, 2003, at 04:07 PM, Ron Johnson wrote:
>
> > 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:
[snip]
> >>
> >> 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.
>
> Okay, I think I just found out that I'm the far left as far as
> programming paradigms go here. It seems really bizarre to see another
> proponent of self-documenting code call "goto considered harmful"
> "Dijkstra's evil legacy."

A segment of the "computing community" took "goto considered harmful"
and tried to contort COBOL-74 into a philosophy for which it was
never meant to fit, thus destroying COBOL in the eyes of 30 years
of students. Besides, elitist CS students and professors think
that commerce is beneath them.

[snip]

-- 
+-----------------------------------------------------------+
| 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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