Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!seismo!sundc!pitstop!sun!amdcad!weitek!dms!albaugh From: albaugh@dms.UUCP (Mike Albaugh) Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc Subject: Re: COBOL -> C converter Message-ID: <560@dms.UUCP> Date: 6 Nov 88 00:19:38 GMT References: Organization: Atari Games Inc., Milpitas, CA Lines: 37 (Sarcasm alert! stop reading _now_ if you require a :-) after every remark that can be possibly misconstrued) From article , by jl3j+@andrew.cmu.edu (John Robert Leavitt): > ... And you ARE rigth that converting COBOL to any Algol descended > language may be kludgy, but... > Is is the Algol-based language's fault? Or is it COBOL's fault? Definitely COBOL's fault, of course. What _could_ the designer's have been thinking of, creating a language in which the user, rather than the compiler writer, decided how much precision was "enough". And the very _idea_ of letting a programmer describe an "external" data structure that the program needed to read, rather than providing "sufficient" data structures, and converting all those old files... (_we_ know how you should have structured your data, so come along quietly now and re-do it) > > Points to ponder... > Indeed. While I'm am no great lover of COBOL, it certainly served its purpose at the time, and until creators of new languages get serious about the accuracy of arithmetic, and win enough converts to provide some hope of portation, it still serves a purpose. If you think, for example, the 'C' or Pascal are such languages, I refer you to the current flame war (in comp.lang.c) over what division means in mathematics vs what it means in C and Pascal. (add :-)'s to taste, but... ) I spend entirely too much of my work day pandering to compilers (and occasionally machines) that seem to have only the vaguest ideas about how to do arithmetic. | Mike Albaugh (albaugh@dms.UUCP || {...decwrl!turtlevax!}weitek!dms!albaugh) | Atari Games Corp (Arcade Games, no relation to the makers of the ST) | 675 Sycamore Dr. Milpitas, CA 95035 voice: (408)434-1709 | The opinions expressed are my own (Boy, are they ever)