Fujitsu COBOL 3
Did you know that you can get Fujitsu Cobol version 3 for absolutely nothing? (The latest versions are paid for, and the new one even targets .Net.)
COBOL was in demand for year 2000 compliance work; so much so there were rumours of recruitment agencies searching retirement homes, looking for retired COBOL programmers…
Anyway, if you’ve ever fancied trying the language considered the most verbose of all time (apparently there’s a disease called “COBOL fingers“, where you wear them down to stumps by typing long complicated mathematical statements in the form “ADD 1 TO SALES GIVING SALES” instead of, say “sales++”, or even “sales = sales + 1″) .
COBOL stands for “COmmon Business Oriented Language”, and the syntax was meant to be understandable by normal humans (that is, not programmers). However I suspect that it was also a reaction to the terseness of operating systems such as Multics, GEORGE III and Unix, all of which go in for shortened commands such as “ls”, “rm” and “chmod”.
Since then we’ve seen the advance of GUIs, much better development tools (ever tried writing a makefile by hand?) and a plethora of different programming languages.
Still, if you don’t fancy COBOL, how about Intercal? <evil grin>
Tags: .Net, COBOL, Intercal, Multics, Unix
December 24th, 2007 at 23:54
I should note that modern COBOL supports mathematical expressions as well as the traditional sentence you gave. Thus you can indeed say:
COMPUTE sales = sales + 1
However, you miss one other older syntax that will do what you want (and predated C):
ADD 1 TO SALES.
Bingo. There is more at Wikipedia in the COBOL entry.
December 25th, 2007 at 00:03
You are, of course, quite right. However if I’d pointed that out the COBOL fingers gag might not have seemed so amusing, and it really did need all the help it could get
I was also planning something along the lines of “ADD 1 TO COBOL GIVING COBOL” as a proposed name for an object-oriented version, but decided against it after that paragraph…
December 25th, 2007 at 10:05
[...] a previous version for personal educational use – and at no cost! I caught wind of this via esotechnica. It may well be that Fujitsu has provided the easiest way to get started in COBOL [...]