Re: Where are spaces required in COBOL source code?


<epc8@xxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:1117229277.861081.54040@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

> http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655-S00/readings/ewd498.html
>
> Alas, he has something very nasty to say about COBOL.

Alas, *had*. He died August 6, 2002.

His antipathy to COBOL is well known; less well known is his similar
antipathy to FORTRAN and APL. I gather he *really* liked ALGOL (as did
Niklaus Wirth), which is the language (in one dialect or another) in which
just about all the software on the Unisys MCP systems is written (a notable
exception being COBOL85, written in Pascal, arguably a direct descendant of
ALGOL).

But note that his comments about COBOL seem to have originated in 1968; the
*first* ANSI standard for COBOL was approved in August of that year, and I
doubt very many fully-compliant implementations were available much before
the end of that year. And COBOL of that era lacked a number of features
that have since been added, including nested programs and delimited scope
statements to address the very concerns he raised.

Also, it is important to recognize that COBOL was never intended to be a
Language Beloved of the Academe like ALGOL, Pascal, PL/1, APL, ADA and on
and on and on; it was intended to be a programming language for
*businesses*, close enough to English that even an accountant could read it.

At the time Dijkstra made these comments, COBOL didn't have stuff like
delimited-scope statements, but it has evolved quite a bit since then.

The only language I know of that seems to have come close to Dijkstra's
preferences was SDL, the system software language for the Burroughs B1700
system and its successors, and its user-available UPL subset.

It lacked the GO TO construct that Dijkstra railed against. It even lacked
"limited" stepping statements like WHILE and FOR. It had only DO and DO
FOREVER, coupled with UNDO; it got around the "go to" problem by providing
"named" DO blocks and named UNDO statements, a surprising violation of
principle.

Dijkstra was a Burroughs research fellow a year or so after the introduction
of the B1700 systems; I suspect his ideas were fundamental to the language,
but I don't think he was actually involved in its development (I might be
wrong).

Dijkstra's (and Wirth's) beloved ALGOL, as well as ALGOL's direct descendant
Pascal, both include GO TO statements.

-Chuck Stevens


.

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