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


"Arnold Trembley" <arnold.trembley@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:XQZCe.11276$5N3.47@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> 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.

While looking for a tutorial on Visual Basic over the Internet (I'm guessing
this was around when VB6 was out, maybe around 1998-1999), I found one which
in which the first lesson said that implementing "Hello World" was simply
too trivial in VB, so the first lesson was writing a text editor. While this
text editor was more simplistic than some of the "professional" ones out
there, it had more features than the "Notepad" application that comes with
Windows.

It's vague in my memory now, but I think it mainly consisted of dragging a
"textfield" GUI element, and a "menu bar" GUI element, onto the windows
form; editing a resource file to specify what options would appear in the
menu bar (and was flexible enough that you could just change the resource
file to provide your application in different languages); and then writing
the code for all the menu options, which typically were 3 to 5 lines of code
each ("save", for example, consisted of displaying a save prompt [which
could be done in 1 statement], reading the text data from the textfield
[another statement], and then writing it to a file [a 3rd statement]).

> 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.

Yeah, VB is what many people call a RAD language, for Rapid Application
Development. I've never used it in a corporate environment, but I heard that
some companies use it as a prototyping tool, to quickly develop something to
show to the client, either within a day, or even right in front of the
client, to make sure both parties understand exactly what it is the client
wants. Once they've established an agreement, they then write the
application in a "real" language (which I assume to them means C++).

Java is very much NOT a RAD language; simple programs can probably be
written more easily and more quickly in other languages such as VB. However,
I think Java provides a lot of support for producing highly maintainable
code, partly by being designed so as to discourage "hacks". So for larger
projects (those that might take several months or years), those would
probably be better written in Java than in VB.

- Oliver


.

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