Day: December 16, 2008

Programming languages

by dougpete, posted in Uncategorized

My fun read of the day was here…

http://www.aegisub.net/2008/12/if-programming-languages-were-religions.html

Now, I don’t know how many visitors or readers of this blog are programmers, but this article is funny.  Of that, there is no doubt.

For those of us who cut our teeth on the classics, it’s sad not to see Fortran or Watfor / Watfiv on the list.  But, good old COBOL is.  It’s an acronym for …  well, if you care, you can look it up easily since you’re already connected to the internet.

The description is perfect.  It was everywhere, in its day.  It’s also the closest to programming in actual English that I’ve run across.

Above all, I do a lot of email daily and I attribute my keyboarding ability to programming in COBOL and SNOBOL.  A classic way to demonstrate programming languages to non-programmers is to show the logic that it takes for a programming language to simply output “Hello World”.  Here’s what it takes in COBOL.  Imagine keyboarding amounts of this code whenever you wanted to create something.  You too could be a great keyboarder.

000100 IDENTIFICATION DIVISION.
000200 PROGRAM-ID.     HELLOWORLD.
000300
000400*
000500 ENVIRONMENT DIVISION.
000600 CONFIGURATION SECTION.
000700 SOURCE-COMPUTER. RM-COBOL.
000800 OBJECT-COMPUTER. RM-COBOL.
000900
001000 DATA DIVISION.
001100 FILE SECTION.
001200
100000 PROCEDURE DIVISION.
100100
100200 MAIN-LOGIC SECTION.
100300 BEGIN.
100400     DISPLAY " " LINE 1 POSITION 1 ERASE EOS.
100500     DISPLAY "Hello world!" LINE 15 POSITION 10.
100600     STOP RUN.
100700 MAIN-LOGIC-EXIT.
100800     EXIT.

Compare this to any of the other programming languages at:  http://www.roesler-ac.de/wolfram/hello.htm

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by dougpete, posted in Uncategorized