3 ms·

Seems like the best language to compare cobol to is probably assembler, with a lot of #defined macro expansions?

• jacquesm 9y ago
  That would have probably been the alternative but assemblers in those days did not usually support macros and if they did they were of very limited power. Also, the GPP was rather adamant about COBOL being a dead-end but Pascal actually owed a fairly large chunk of its data structures to COBOL and without the 'record' construct I highly doubt Pascal would have gone as far as it did, it was a good idea whose time was ripe and COBOL being business oriented had immediate need to support this (as well as data files), and then there was the fact that COBOL more or less introduced platform independence (though in practice that translated into 'less work than otherwise'). All in all it really is not fair to label COBOL a 'dead end'.
  • deleted 9y ago
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