2 ms·
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
by 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.