Real Old School Programming (was: Re: Where to buy a Selectric?)

[Nico de Jong]

> On 12/31/2005 at 8:45 AM Nico de Jong wrote:
>
> >vertically divided. For Cobol, you could see e.g. that the first 3
columns
> >were blank, the next 3 numbered from 010 to 300 or so, then a divider
> >between between 15 and 16 (IIRC), and again "around" col. 73 (marking for
> >Continuation Line).
>
> IIRC, the first six columns were "programmer sequence numbers"; ( i.e.,
the
> compiler didn't really care about them, but would issue a warning if they
> were out of order) divided into two groups of three (1-3 were the page
> number, 4-6 were the line number).   Most folks just left them blank.

Right.

> Column 7 was the continuation; an asterisk in this column signified a
> comment card;

Right again, I think my memory bits are rotting a bit.

any other non-blank signified a continuation.  Area "A"
> started in columns 8-11 (Used for divison and  section headers and
> paragraph names and 01 and FD level items, etc.); Area B (used for
> everything else) started in column 12.  And, as in the case of most other
> card-oriented languages, 73-80 were reserved for sequence numbers or other
> identification, should you drop the box containing your source code.

Right. I once made up a deck-copying "program" for the IBM 517 (or was it
519, the card reproducing punch)
You could toss in your unnumbered ( or numbered, but with "holes" in the
sequence, or whatever), and it would produce a new deck, but without print.
Off to the punch room, where they had some 029/129's which could read the
cards and print on the top line.

Those were the days...

> In spite of its starting out as a language using more-or-less English
> sentence syntax, COBOL is a tough language to learn because it's quite
> large,  particularly if you consider all of the variations of data types
> and statements (e.g., how many variations of the INSPECT statement can you
> think of?).
>
It's a long time since I used INSPECT. I can only remember something with
INSPECT ... SPACES...., but those bits have rotted away...
Apart from that, COBOL is a nice language, if you keep away from the more
sinister things like INSPECT, ALTER TO PROCEED TO, REDEFINES in more then 2
levels....

Some nice things are GO TO DEPENDING ON (if you use it carefully), PERFORM
VARYING (but that got _ugly_ very fast).
For commercial purposes, the record layouts etc are very nice and easily
deciphered. Overall, I like it better than PL/I

Nico