Re: Proliferation of languages

On Dec 13, 1:25 pm, Mark.Wri...@xxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
Peter H.M.Brooks <pe...@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

: I think you even have object orientated
: constructs in COBOL and FORTRAN now.

Hmph...only if you are a sicko!

Fortran is a great language for number-crunching; it doesnt need all this
"object" nonsense to do that. ;-)

I agree completely. I wasn't trying to start a language war - there
are plenty of those elsewhere. Just noting that, sicko or not, these
constructs do appear.

I don't think it is altogether a bad thing. I had some interesting
code to debug a couple of decades ago. A largish program had ceased to
work completely after a minor program change. It was frustrating, but
I enjoyed tracking down the problem. The problem boiled down to an
'IF' statement that didn't work any more. The strange thing was the
variable being tested didn't exist before the 'IF' statement itself
(not that easy to discover when everything is known as IXN01 and
XYNNZ3, no matter what it is). What had happened was that somebody had
added a new variable to a declaration. No harm in that, you'd think.
However, the original 'coder' (if that is the right name for such a
person) was relying on the object of the 'IF' statement being an
integer appearing just after another integer declared several pages
back. When a double was assigned to the integer the lower bits were
checked by the 'IF' statement.

You can't do that sort of terrible thing in an object orientated
language - well, as they say, 'real' programmers can write FORTRAN in
any language, so you probably can, but it takes a lot more effort.

I'm not sure about objects in COBOL, though. As we all know, COBOL was
invented so that the average businessman could jot down a couple of
pages of it and produce a new sales incentive program without any need
for training, it being just like English - I'm not sure if that
average businessman would be all that keen on objects, even if he
existed.
.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Help Constructing Fictional Cross-Religious Movement
    ... My FORTRAN stopped at IV and that was some years ago. ... >>> biggest problem I would see would be a compiler and OS dependency. ... >>language actually defines ... ... >>Unfortunately I don't know enough about COBOL to tell. ...
    (rec.arts.sf.composition)
  • Re: I need an understanding of what C++ is good for -Thanks
    ... > What if his language is FORTRAN? ... Or COBOL? ... much out of an interview with a COBOL programmer, admittedly, seeing as how ... interview them just because they used a different language in the past. ...
    (comp.lang.cpp)
  • Re: FORTRAN or COBOL first ?
    ... Mark Westwood was almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea: ... > to learn Fortran or COBOL. ... Hell no. Fortran 66 is the best language to learn. ...
    (comp.lang.fortran)
  • Re: FORTRAN or COBOL first ?
    ... Mark Westwood was almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea: ... > to learn Fortran or COBOL. ... Hell no. Fortran 66 is the best language to learn. ...
    (comp.lang.cobol)
  • Re: VB vs C#
    ... By the way i just saw on a history path list that COBOL has it`s own line ... change your Fortran advice to the C# part. ... a kind of less complex language in the same area as Algol. ... Well for previous VB6 proggers i would definedly say move to VB.Net, ...
    (microsoft.public.dotnet.languages.vb)