Re: Re: [Nolug] Evo and Outlook

On Tue, 2003-07-15 at 20:45, jdtiede@bellsouth.net wrote:
> 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
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