Re: Why COBOL is losing the POWER struggle

Howard Brazee wrote:
On Sun, 21 Jun 2009 05:22:24 +1200, "Pete Dashwood"
<dashwood@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

I have commented more than once here that the newer languages are simply
more concise and more powerful than COBOL. Less writing means fewer errors.

Possible. But I've seen some subtle errors in very concise
languages, not to mention difficult to understand code.

Indeed. If Pete's thesis were true in general, we should all be
programming in APL.

There is no simple correlation between eliminating steps and
eliminating errors. Some steps are unnecessary and have a non-zero
probability of error, so eliminating them reduces the overall
probability of error. Some steps are error-prone, and if they can be
replaced with fewer, less-error-prone steps, that reduces the
probability of error.

But there are a host of examples from many fields where the opposite
is true. That's why we have failsafes and interlocks and checklists -
all extra steps introduced to reduce the overall probability of error.

--
Michael Wojcik
Micro Focus
Rhetoric & Writing, Michigan State University
.

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