gvcormack@watdaisy.UUCP (Gordon V. Cormack) (11/27/84)
The recent discussion of IF A LESS THAN B OR C etc. reminds me of
another case in which the semantics of COBOL are clearly not those
implied by English interpretation. The statement
MULTIPLY A BY B
stores the result in B, not A as is implied. Therefore the following
COBOL statement is invalid, even though it makes perfect sense.
MULTIPLY MY-SALARY BY 2.
In order to have the desired semantics, one must say:
MULTIPLY 2 BY MY-SALARY.
Gordon Cormack gvcormack@watdaisy.uucp
gvcormack%watdasiy@waterloo.csnetbarmar@mit-eddie.UUCP (Barry Margolin) (11/30/84)
In article <6769@watdaisy.UUCP> gvcormack@watdaisy.UUCP (Gordon V. Cormack) writes: >The statement > > MULTIPLY A BY B > >stores the result in B, not A as is implied. I was reading the transcript of a talk by Grace Hopper on the early history and development of COBOL, and she mentioned that they wanted the DIVIDE statement to be DIVIDE dividend BY divisor because it is what people normally say, but they made it DIVIDE divisor INTO dividend so that they could maintain the consistency of the result always being the second value. She didn't mention the MULTIPLY verb, but it looks like in this case there wasn't a form of the English sentence that fit. So, they obviously decided to abandon consistency with English in order to maintain internal consistency in the language. In other words, a trade-off was necessary, and they chose the less intuitive one. -- Barry Margolin ARPA: barmar@MIT-Multics UUCP: ..!genrad!mit-eddie!barmar