3 ms·

"STOP RUN." How computer-ish. What else is it going to do at the end of the program? I'd find it hard to work in a programming language that's all upper case

"STOP RUN." How computer-ish. What else is it going to do at the end of the program? I'd find it hard to work in a programming language that's all upper case and shouting.

wobbleblob 4y ago
What else it is going to do is keep looping until the end of the input file is reached, which was the programming model at the time.
- andrewstuart 4y ago
  There you go. Is that something all COBOL programs do, loop back to the start? Did other programming languages do this?
  - wobbleblob 4y ago
    I know RPG did that. I can't tell you if all programs do that, probably not today, but that was the origin. Keep in mind that at the time, all your data was on tape, punch cards or disk, you only had a few kb of RAM. IBM still churns out new releases of the programming language, where they keep tacking on support for all the things programmers of today want to do.
DanHulton 4y ago
Yes. Yes you would. Here's a story for you. Back in '02 when I was learning COBOL in school, the absolute worst sin you could commit was forgetting that STOP RUN or the period following it. If you did that, the mainframe would crash, and nobody could continue working on their assignments until somebody had called the operator and gotten them to reset the mainframe. The night before assignments were due, they had to pay someone overtime to stay up and be ready to hit the switch at any time because of this. And, of course, if you hadn't saved in a while, you lost your work. At some point, we either found or were given a local IDE, which we then used to write code that we tested on the mainframe afterwards, and it was a game-changer. But also, the IDE used a later and better version of COBOL than the mainframe, so sometimes you'd write an instruction that worked locally and blew up on the mainframe, and you'd have to rewrite your whole everything to get around missing basic control flow structures.

"STOP RUN." How computer-ish. What else is it going to do at the end of the program? I'd find it hard to work in a programming language that's all upper case and shouting.

wobbleblob 4y ago

What else it is going to do is keep looping until the end of the input file is reached, which was the programming model at the time.

andrewstuart 4y ago
There you go. Is that something all COBOL programs do, loop back to the start? Did other programming languages do this?
- wobbleblob 4y ago
  I know RPG did that. I can't tell you if all programs do that, probably not today, but that was the origin. Keep in mind that at the time, all your data was on tape, punch cards or disk, you only had a few kb of RAM. IBM still churns out new releases of the programming language, where they keep tacking on support for all the things programmers of today want to do.

DanHulton 4y ago

Yes. Yes you would. Here's a story for you. Back in '02 when I was learning COBOL in school, the absolute worst sin you could commit was forgetting that STOP RUN or the period following it. If you did that, the mainframe would crash, and nobody could continue working on their assignments until somebody had called the operator and gotten them to reset the mainframe. The night before assignments were due, they had to pay someone overtime to stay up and be ready to hit the switch at any time because of this. And, of course, if you hadn't saved in a while, you lost your work. At some point, we either found or were given a local IDE, which we then used to write code that we tested on the mainframe afterwards, and it was a game-changer. But also, the IDE used a later and better version of COBOL than the mainframe, so sometimes you'd write an instruction that worked locally and blew up on the mainframe, and you'd have to rewrite your whole everything to get around missing basic control flow structures.