<OT> For all of us Old Fart$

[Bill Campbell]

On Fri, Sep 27, 2002 at 02:21:21PM -0500, Ben Duncan wrote:
>Thought I'd pass this along for us who still hold COBOL near and dear 
>to our hearts.
>
>Just got my copy of Kobol (COBOL) from
>
>http://www.thekompany.com
>
>And must say, for the price it has turned out to be a pretty 
>impressive product.
>It does pretty much everthing that all those over-priced "Cobol" 
>IDE/Compilers
>can do and at a fraction of the cost.
>
>So .. anyone want to join in a write accounting programs?

I had about 10 20-drawer file cabinets full of COBOL accounting programs I
wrote for the Burroughs Medium Systems (B-2500 - B-4800) from 1969 through
1976.  I could probably dig up the customized RealWorld accounting stuff I
was running on the Tandy Model 16/6000 from 1983 through 1988 or so.

COBOL had some really powerful commands that I've never seen in any other
language (e.g. MOVE CORRESPONDIN, ADD CORRESPONDING) which made it very
easy to handle fairly complex jobs very easily.

I did run into some compatibility problems when moving from the Burroughs
COBOL to other vendors since Burroughs COBOL was fully recursive, with
PERFORMS working through a stack.  This broke some programs horribly when I
tried running them on RMCOBOL.

Bill
--
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Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human.  At best he
is a tolerable subhuman who has learned to wear shoes, bathe and not
make messes in the house.
		-- Lazarus Long, "Time Enough for Love"