🚀 go-pugleaf

(Sarcasm alert! stop reading _now_ if you require a :-) after every
remark that can be possibly misconstrued)

From article <sXQJHoy00VQa02-Goq@andrew.cmu.edu>, 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)
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