As an appointed member of the three man committee on the long range future
of COBOL, which committee was never disbanded, so I assume it still exists
and which also never met, I have a few comments. These comments are made
with a pure heart, since I never written a COBOL program, read a COBOL
program or knowingly hired a COBOL programmer.
COBOL was intended to look like English and to be like English. Well, maybe
it was only advertised as such. Fortunately, the Committee was fascinated
only by fragments of the syntax of English and did not know how unsuited the
semantics of English were to expressing computer programs. Programming in
English is possible just as is writing differential equations in English. It
is as feasible and as worth doing as making an airplane whose pilot sits on
a Western saddle and controls it with reins and spurs.
I never met anyone who admitted to liking to program in COBOL.
-- From: jmc@SAIL.Stanford.EDU (John McCarthy)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.books
Subject: Re: bug (dictionary)
Date: 16 May 1995 06:10:19 MET
