"Goto statement considered superfluous" (was: If you were inventing C)

From: Richard (riplin_at_Azonic.co.nz)
Date: 09/24/04 

Date: 23 Sep 2004 15:52:12 -0700

"Howard Brazee" <howard@brazee.net> wrote

> I don't think it would. It already was significantly different from other
> languages of the time. We would have used the tool as given to us.

In what way was it 'significantly different' ? It was developed as a
common subset of Flow-Matic and the other languages in the
acknowledgement in every Cobol manual. It used ideas from many
business languages. Its major distinction was that it was 'common',
ie the same on every system rather than the existing business
languages which were different from each other.
 
> I also don't think that removing ADD, SUBTRACT, MULTIPLY, and DIVIDE would have
> hurt it. We learned to use those verbs because they were part of the tool.

It certainly would have hurt it unless they also provided COMPUTE
(which didn't arrive until '74).

The problem with COMPUTE is that it uses an intermediate result that
may make the calculations much slower than using the discrete
statements. In 1960 there was no 'power to burn' in the CPUs and
forcing the use of COMPUTE would have hurt the language greatly.

Even in the 80s there was a reluctance to use COMPUTE due to
performance issues. For example I was running MF CIS Cobol on
multiuser 2.5 MHz machines.

Similarly in the 80s C was not displacing Fortran because C promoted
real to double in function calls. Fortran used the parameters as
specified and this often meant that Fortran would outperform C, and
still does.

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