From Newsgroup: comp.os.linux.misc

The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> wrote:

On 07/09/2026 09:14, c186282 wrote:

On 9/6/26 02:50, Lawrence DrCOOliveiro wrote:

On Fri, 04 Sep 2026 12:56:59 GMT, Charlie Gibbs wrote:

... mention COBOL ... and their faces would turn green.

Another of the ironies of COBOL was that it was supposedly focused
very strictly on rCLbusinessrCY needs. So you had very limited
string-processing capabilities or any dynamic storage allocation,
because supposedly rCLbusinessrCY applications didnrCOt require that.
Instead, the language put a lot of effort into dealing with all
kinds of complexities involving ISAM files.

Another clueless dimwit who has no idea of the environment in which
the language was developed.

Note the source you quoted.... Our local Troll. So of course the
paragraph has a "cluelessness" aspect intentionally woven in to trigger
some "troll results".

Then relational databases became popular among rCLbusinessrCY users.
And the best way to interface to them involved dynamically
generating SQL query strings. Which COBOL wasnrCOt very good at --
and still isnrCOt, as far as I can tell. Various vendor-proprietary
extensions dealt with this by letting a program embed
statically-defined query templates, but that sacrificed
portability. And it still didnrCOt deal very well with more ad-hoc
database access -- which rCLbusinessrCY users found was a very useful
thing to do.

And nowadays, who has even heard of ISAM files? Can you even find them
in rCLbusinessrCY environments any more?

More cluelessness

See above.

-a COBOL *would* get it done - by SOME means.

-a However it wasn't always very EASY or LOGICAL means.

-a The original goal of an "English-ish" lang that would
-a self-document - BIG FAIL.

More clulessness. You dint write COBOL and document it later.
You wrote a business analsyis case, designed your data structures and
wrote in plain english how these would be affected bu any cobol module.

The actual code was done by monkeys slavishily following the spec.

Just like Java programming for "enterprise" is done today. Only now
they call slice and dice "the spec" into numerous "User Stories" that
are but a tiny slice of the whole spec. So the code monkeys never even
get a view of the big picture of what they are being asked to code
towards.
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