Re: Re: [Nolug] Evo and Outlook

    There was once a former HP man from Guatemala, who started consulting on his own from his home in Guatemala (sorry, I can't remember his name 30 years later). He went to a conference on structured COBOL, and said, "You know, it isn't the GOTOs that are so bad, is the COMEFROMs."

============================================================
From: Ron Johnson <ron.l.johnson@cox.net>
Date: 2003/07/15 Tue PM 06:39:46 EDT
To: NOLUG ML <nolug@joeykelly.net>
Subject: 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
+-----------------------------------------------------------+
___________________
Nolug mailing list
nolug@nolug.org
============================================================
___________________
Nolug mailing list
nolug@nolug.org