5 ms·
As someone who worked on a 35 million loc cobol and jcl system for several years in the late 90's, I don't find this to be funny at all. Cobol was purported to
by throwaway1492 3y ago
As someone who worked on a 35 million loc cobol and jcl system for several years in the late 90's, I don't find this to be funny at all. Cobol was purported to be readable with english language like syntax to make it more understandable. Giving gems such as:
MULTIPLY TAX-RATE OF STATE(43) BY BALANCE GIVING SALES-TAX-AMOUNT.
Note the period is sigificant.
- paddw 3y agoI have no doubt English like syntax is a terrible idea but this seems like a surprisingly readable example.
- maxbond 3y agoAgreed, I rather like this line of code, but I must admit that the C-like version is perhaps better: sales_tax_amount = balance * state[42].tax_rate; (Assuming I've guessed the meaning of the Cobol correctly - perhaps that's the rub.) (ETA: Added semicolon.) (ETA2: Fixed critical indexing bug.)
- quickthrower2 3y ago#define MULTIPLY sales_tax_amount = balance * state[43].tax_rate; //
- phlakaton 3y agoYou forgot the semicolon. Note the semicolon is significant. Barbaric, I know.
- throwawaymobule 3y agoI think indexes start at 1 in COBOL. I had to look it up though. (aiui, they're called TABLEs and the index can start from any number) So that'd be state[42].
- maxbond 3y agoNot all heroes wear capes. I've put in a PR to upstream. LGTM
- Turing_Machine 3y agoI hear the successor language is much better. It's called ADD 1 TO COBOL GIVING COBOL.
- jancsika 3y agoThat is surprisingly readable and makes me want to go learn COBOL. Could I now get you to criticize eating healthy, please? :)
- SanjayMehta 3y agoBefore jumping in with both feet, please check out the ALTER statement. GOTO on steroids and more.
- lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 3y ago> The ALTER statement changes the transfer point specified in a GO TO statement. What could go wrong?
- xeonmc 3y agoFinalizing in COBOL: I am altering the data. Pray I do not alter it further.
- SanjayMehta 3y agoT-Shirt material which a vanishingly small number of victims will understand.
- dr_kiszonka 3y agoFair critique. That's why INTERCAL was so much better.
- p-e-w 3y agoIt's actually a pretty interesting question why programming languages that work like that are a bad idea. From decades of experience, I know intuitively that they are, but I find myself unable to formulate a concise description of what exactly is wrong with this approach.
- frutiger 3y agoToo much ambiguity that needs a large amount of context to resolve.
- p-e-w 3y agoBut why is that a problem? That's literally how we speak every single day. In fact, given that this is how all the languages that humans are already familiar with work, it's hard to see why this wouldn't be the best approach for constructing a programming language.
- behnamoh 3y agoBecause: - humans can ask back questions to clarify any ambiguity; computers don't have the capacity to understand ambiguity, let alone asking for clarification. - computers are trusted to work w/o failure almost 100% of the time. humans err (to be human is to err, anyway), so we'd never put a human in charge of critical things we use computers for.
- readthenotes1 3y agoI agree with your sarcastic reply that naturally grown languages are simply horrible for shared comprehension! For instance, the poem, or should I say program using the example in the post has several different interpretations, and at least some of those teachers would say are flabbergastingly incorrect.
- oarabbus_ 3y agoIt’s quite literally a problem, every day.
- 3y ago
- sharmi 3y agoThere are multiple responses to the above parent noting how readable the above line of code is and yet how it might go wrong. The first pitfall of using english as a programming language that occurs to me (as a totally Cobol ignorant person): * Human languages tend to be nebulous around the edges and fluid, often with single word taking up multiple meanings and same function done by multiple words. There are multiple ways to express the same concept. This allows for the language to change and evolve with the times. * OTOH programming languages need to be specific and exact for the computer to be able to interpret it and ensure it functions as expected across devices and over time. This means to make English function as a programming language, we will have to take the existing language, whittle down most of the senses and many words, assign one function to one word and use a very trimmed down and reduced version of English. Now you will have to know two forms of English * The human one * The computer-compatible one Worse, our human version of the language can often trip up our computer-compatible one. I imagine even debugging would be harder, because when you look into the code, the brain would see perfectly good english and not register any issue with punctuation or tokens as expected by the interpreter. Consider the below version. MULTIPLY TAXRATE FROM STATE(43) WITH BALANCE GIVING SALES-TAX-AMOUNT. I have made 3 changes here, which might or might not work with COBOL (I am Cobol ignorant ;) ). But if a person tries to find the changes or debug, it would difficult for the human brain to register what is wrong as this is perfectly good english.
- schoen 3y ago> I have made 3 changes here, which might or might not work with COBOL (I am Cobol ignorant ;) ). I've never used COBOL before, but this thread and your post made me curious and I installed GNU Cobol and found a sample program that demonstrates a few language features. After playing around with it a little, I think I've understood that "OF" is like a struct element (or object property) accessor, the parens are an array index, and the hyphen is a syntactically significant part of the identifier. "BY" is apparently a mandatory part of the multiplication operator. Conclusion: each of your three changes (while, as you said, perfectly reasonable from the English language point of view) would indeed break the COBOL code! By the way, I remember this being a bit of an issue when I tried programming in HyperTalk: on occasion I would unintentionally come up with an English synonym for some natural-language HyperTalk code, and it wouldn't be valid HyperTalk.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]