Re: Next generation COBOL?

Herwig,

I attended a talk and had some discussions afterwards with a group who was working on a quantum computer for the NSA. The question came up: Immediate problems aside, what COULD quantum computers potentially do for us better than conventional computers?

The only apparent answer seemed to be factoring large numbers for crypto applications, which rather limits the number of potential sales to the number of countries. While there are a LOT of other conceivable applications, they all fail because either the setup would be impossibly difficult or because conventional computers are fast enough, or there is some other computational technology (e.g. analog) that would work well.

However, perhaps you know some way past this logjam to be able to construct practical future quantum computers to solve real-world problems?

No. That depends in which language you are most fluent,
and what kind of abstractions you use in thinking.

I respectfully disagree. I am fluent in many computer languages, but I have NEVER been able to speed read any of them like well written COBOL. 

I also respectfully disagree - I am also fluent in many computer
languages - and what the most understandable programs are depends,
of course, the currently most used languages - as for me, that is
(well written) C, at the moment, and from a more ojective standpoint,
Ada.

It sounds like you missed the SPEED in speed read above. Sure, once you are concerned with details of functionality then COBOL mires down, but it is sure fast as finding the place where you need to drill down. There is a LOT of brain that has been trained to read English fast, so why not use it?!

My Ada-experience, however, is 10 years old, so there is some
loss in the virtuosity with that language.

ADA is far superior to C for writing reliable code. I wrote the ADA linker for ROLM Corp's ADA compiler.

Quite so. Worse: The same language means different thing to
different persons. All those of us who are/were married know that.

A problem not (yet?) shared by programming languages.

This of course is the essence of conversion and porting, where the same statements often mean different things to different computers.

Programming Languages for quantum Computers, however,
look very different from programming languages for
classical computation.


Has someone proposed such a language? That WOULD be interesting.

His (and my) answer is the Many Worlds Interpretation of
Quantum Mechanics

In real-world simulations, it often boils down to the one-dimensional numbers REALLY being approximate coordinates in a multi-dimensional space that is long and narrow, with the number being the position along the major axis. Only when you consider that those approximate numbers are really hyperspheres of uncertainty in he multidimensional space can you determine the potential extend of the uncertainty in your computations.

In short, no you cannot predict the EXACT future, but you CAN often predict the future along with an indication of accuracy, that obviously deteriorates the further out you extrapolate. The problem with current computers is that they do NOT automatically determine the uncertainty when it is entirely possible/practical to do so. The reason that things are now as they are is because the wrong people were in the IEEE-754 standards committee. This was a "volunteer" organization, meaning that only those who were paid by special interests to promote EXISTING standards participated, thereby guaranteeing our present mess.

but this subject leaves the topic of this newsgroup.

I\m not so sure.

I could envision future COBOLeze statements like:

X where X^2 - 3 = 6. would set X to +/-3

Sounds SQL-ish?

Good observation. Indeed, you can compose SQL statements that compute without retrieving any records. However, in this example there is a slightly different meaning of "where".

The basic inability to predict the future *does* *not* depend on
limited computing power - and it is not even possible with a
quantum-computer which simulates all of reality. The reason is
that there is not a single future but an ever branching tree of
futures. A Quantum Computer could compute those simulations
correctly but would *also* yield the different futures - you would
have to select one of the simulated futures if you want to have
a definite answer.

Even a quantum computer would be unable to predict the future without PRECISE knowledge of the present - an unattainable input.

There is *no* way to predict a future - because there is
always a bunch of futures!

We can be pretty sure that tomorrow's temp will be below 100C - but how much below? The challenge is NOT in predicting the future, but rather in precisely stating how accurate your prediction is.

Actually, my employer pays me for thinking about COBOL and related
subjects.

This DOES sound interesting. Perhaps there is some overlap in our motivations?

Steve Richfie1d
.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: OS X.4.X update...
    ... back" some languages you have removed, unless they are smart enough not ... has very little in the way of multiple language support. ... applications which support Unicode - AppleWorks is not one of them). ... It doesn't even touch on the other things you can do with computers now ...
    (comp.sys.mac.system)
  • Re: Meyer(s) gets it wrong
    ... but not in the same way that many, supposed, OO languages support them. ... I have two programs running on seperate computers. ... TBH I find the idea of seperate processes which have defined interfaces, ... be described as being 'just' good SP practice. ...
    (comp.programming)
  • Re: Normal areas between two values: a home-made program
    ... Because the algorithm was do to span values greater than 0, the different signals of interval bounds were took into consideration. ... of computer hardware including process control computers. ... I've written code in other languages including C and C++. ... interpreter ...
    (sci.stat.math)
  • Re: All languages are equally fit
    ... languages do not, with many of the natural computer ... dropped out of the computers. ... both for fixed point and floating point ... subroutine libraries. ...
    (sci.lang)
  • Re: advantages of forth over other languages
    ... but the people who actually accomplish things with computers have other priorities. ... The purpose of a programming language is to express a solution within the paradigms, abstractions, models, and idioms supported by that language. ... "learn new languages" means understanding different ways to conceptualize and create a solution for a problem. ...
    (comp.lang.forth)