thornley@cs.umn.edu (David H. Thornley) (03/13/90)
In article <1760@awdprime.UUCP> sanders@sanders.austin.ibm.com (Tony Sanders) writes: >... Maybe we should all get MBA's while we are at it. Hey, >lets all take up COBAL, there is no way in h*ll that you can have >a flippant approach to ANYTHING in COBAL :-) Actually, COBOL is a great language to be flippant in. It's just that all that typing *all* *those* *words* makes most people to numb to be flippant. COBOL forces many things to be named that really don't need names, so you are free to name your work files after old girl friends or favorite flavors of ice cream. Also, the English-like sequence makes it easy to write things like GO TO HELL and ADD GIN VERMOUTH GIVING MARTINI as part of a valid program. You can also have identifiers up to 31 characters long (unusual for a 50s language!) with hyphens for spaces, so you can get all sorts of strange names. (Not that I recommend all this in practice, you understand, but flippancy has kept me sane through long system designs.) We seem to be getting away from C, so I'm going to try to direct followups to alt.cobol. DHT