Re: Is it always possible to write a COBOL program using only 1 sentence per paragraph?



Pete Dashwood wrote:

Thanks guys, I appreciate you cutting me some slack :-)

On this occasion it isn't necessary. I have responded to Howard's post and what I'm saying isn't geeky, it is accepted practice in environments where they use modern techniques as a matter of course.

People who are not COBOL programmers are used to interacting with tools that allow them to assemble system functionality, in a way that someone whose whole life is COBOL could not imagine. There are 'drag and drop' tools that generate system functionality in minutes, that would take days to duplicate in COBOL. My point is that there is another world outside of procedural programming. And it is not the domain of geeks; people in the work place are encountering it in one form or another. And newcomers take it for granted.

Pete.

Way back in 1996, my employer paid for a class in Visual Basic (version 4, I believe). While I have never had occasion to use it at work, it was very interesting since I had no previous (or subsequent) exposure to GUI programming. I wasn't all that keen on writing a program by "dragging and dropping", but I was very impressed when every student in the class built a working inquiry application against an Access table in mere minutes, without writing a line of code.

It would have taken me several days to do the same task in traditional COBOL.

A few months ago I had an introductory class on Java programming. I managed to get through all the in-class assignments, but they never got as far as reading or writing a file, or even accepting user entered data from the screen. I guess that must be covered in the intermediate or advanced class.


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http://arnold.trembley.home.att.net/

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