Quote:
Originally Posted by DNSB
I just found that COBOL was horribly wordy. Something that took one line in APL and 10 lines in Waterloo Fortran took 2 pages in COBOL. Admittedly, the APL code was write only, the Fortran code took quite a few comments while the COBOL code was pretty easy to follow without comments.
For columns, there was the day I discovered that JCL did not see anything past the 80th column. No warnings, just characters that went directly to the bit bucket. Definitely, a WTF moment.
Hmmm... what else? Forth was a learning experience.
Regards,
David
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Yes, COBOL was indeed very wordy, but then that kind of made it self-commenting.
I never had to endure Forth, but I remember reading about an English home computer, the
Jupiter Ace, that came out in the early 80's and that included Forth as it's built-in language rather than the more traditional BASIC. This interested me quite a bit but I guess it was a step to far for the general public and was the main reason this home computer didn't sell too well.
I used PL/1 a bit. Prime created a couple of spin-off languages that were based on PL/1, PLP and SPL, that they used internally for systems development. I was quite lucky in that I worked for the New Zealand agent for Prime and so we had access to a lot of Prime source code. Looking through the source of Primos was fun, found a few undocumented routines that I made use of.
Ah, happy memories...
