Re: Next generation COBOL?

2005-11-24 23:44:32 MET

Steve Richfie1d wrote:

As a concept, the original COBOL (before they started tacking numbers onto it) was a thing of beauty - where with some skill you could clearly state your methodology in grammatically correct English, that even an untrained secretary could read. 

This was, to my mind, a failure - among those merits
COBOL admittedly actually has.

Precision does not need many words - it needs clear
concepts. Trying to use everyday language for programming
is doomed to be a failure - either it is not everyday
language, or it does not work.

And then - why should the untrained secretary read programs?
In order to understand concepts of commerce and finance, a
mind is not "untrained".

An "untrained mind" is someone who cannot form clear
and grammatically correct sentences. Such a mind cannot
program, in no language, and no application. There is no
programming language specially for blondes - and it's
certainly not COBOL.

> ...

What is gradually emerging over many projects is a new concept for a distant descendant of COBOL, where things are stated in much higher-level problem-oriented terms and the details of data organization are taken care of by a much smarter execution environment than COBOL ever enjoyed. ... 

Well. Maybe. Distant descendant of nowadays computers
could even clean my windows. - I doubt that I live to
see it.

> Also, it is SO simple that you could write and debug an
interpreter or translator for it in something like BASIC in a week or so, so it should become ubiquitous for many of the things that VBA and Java are now used for, because of its 100% readability even by untrained people. 

No. COBOL, even COBOL++, is no substitute for thinking.

Perhaps I am not the only one following this path? 

You are not the only one. A former colleague of mine is
very fond of AI - and we often have an argument about that.

He always looses - I dare tell you because he does not
read this group.

His AI does not tell him to.

Herwig

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*  http://www.quantenrente.de    Josella Simone Playton  *
*  http://www.Josella-Simone-Playton.de  Herwig Huener   *
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