Windows 11 25H2 officially released

[Anonymouse]

Can you do that in COBOL? I know it uses (well, used) more keywords than BASIC, but I'd no idea you could say such a thing. Mind you, it makes sense - it did tend to use words rather than symbols, for clarity. It was intended for, mainly, managers, i.e. non-technical people. Come to think of it, I think you could say PLUS and MINUS instead of/as well as + and -. You could definitely say ADD 1 TO COUNT as opposed to COUNT = COUNT + 1 (or, in C, COUNT++).

If it's so, I wish I'd known it then! You have no idea how STUPID I felt debugging that damn program! I even modified the design at one point, thinking I'd found a mistake - not realising the mistake was mine. It should've been obvious: my friend's program and mine had exactly the same program actions, the same design - so in essence they were the same program.
(But this wasn't plagiarism - JSP tends to force this in COBOL. Program actions in the JSP design translate directly to program statements, and so the same design produces the same program. The advantage of JSP is that if things go wrong you can quickly figure out why.
Unless, of course, the error is subtle, as mine was...)

So their giving different results - especially since his program worked exactly as predicted with both data sets, i.e. his program + my data = the results I'd expected for my program, and his program + his data = the results he'd expected - should've made it obvious where the problem was (we were required to work out what the results should be, then check them against the actual results, as part of our documentation - Pat Diskin, our lecturer, was red-hot on that. But you couldn't get away with just going down the list of results and idly ticking them off, oh no - she was shrewd enough to be able to tell, and she would mark you down. No, you had to genuinely check).

It was just that the results were totally unlike what I'd expected, so I couldn't figure it out from the pattern of errors (in fact, as I recall the results were totally screwy and made no sense whatsoever). But I made that ONE correction, and that put everything right. I did confess to the error in my programming log.

If anything, this was useful to teach the importance of thoroughness in checking, accuracy and, above all, GIGO. The resulting statement was logically correct, so the compiler didn't, couldn't catch it. It was just factually wrong - not a syntax error (which would have been caught), but a logical one. No compiler could catch that, even today (well, maybe an AI compiler, if there is such a thing - and even then it'd be required to analyse program context and think 'ah, he's said this but he meant to say that', likely a monumental task even for the Enterprise-D computer).

To coin a phrase, whoops.

I did get an A, though. The corrected program worked perfectly - my program + my data = my expected results, and my program + his data = his expected results. Yes, he got an A too, and Pat did not for one instant think either of us had copied from the other - she could tell that, too. You know, McGonagall reminds me of her...

Originally Posted by Anonymouse

Can you do that in COBOL?

Yes you can, you can also use NOT (as in 'IS NOT GREATER THAN').
Of course, thats the same as 'IS LESS THAN OR EQUAL TO' which you could also use.

Originally Posted by Anonymouse

[FONT="Arial"]Can you do that in COBOL?
I know it uses (well, used) more keywords than BASIC

Used ?

COBOL is still alive and well.
I used it reqularly at Experian, and its still used by many mainframes.
Before COBOL, I programmed in FORTRAN, thats still alive and kicking as well.

Dont be fooled by Universities trying to tell you everything is done in so called "Modern" languages.

Can you do that in COBOL? I know it uses (well, used) more keywords than BASIC, but I'd no idea you could say such a thing. Mind you, it makes sense - it did tend to use words rather than symbols, for clarity. It was intended for, mainly, managers, i.e. non-technical people.

No, it wasn’t - it was intended for COBOL Programmers*, who in the 70s and 80s wrote most of the World’s business Systems in it (and you’d be amazed how many Legacy Systems are still running on it).

I was a coder in the 80’s and early 90s, using Mainframe Assembler, COBOL, RPG2, and SQL - never saw a Manager writing code (although they would sometimes give advice, if they were ex-coders).