Re:Jean Sammet, co-creator of COBOL, has died
by marktangotango on Monday June 05, 2017 @06:40AM
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Seems like the best language to compare cobol to is probably assembler, with a lot of #defined macro expansions?
Re:Jean Sammet, co-creator of COBOL, has died
by jacquesm on Monday June 05, 2017 @06:53AM
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That would have probably been the alternative but assemblers in those days did not usually support macros and if they did they were of very limited power.
Also, the GPP was rather adamant about COBOL being a dead-end but Pascal actually owed a fairly large chunk of its data structures to COBOL and without the 'record' construct I highly doubt Pascal would have gone as far as it did, it was a good idea whose time was ripe and COBOL being business oriented had immediate need to support this (as well as data files), and then there was the fact that COBOL more or less introduced platform independence (though in practice that translated into 'less work than otherwise').
All in all it really is not fair to label COBOL a 'dead end'.
So beware of criticizing an old programming language from a modern viewpoint, just like FORTRAN and Lisp it taught us a lot of valuable lessons. If all the COBOL code in the world that is still running would stop working tomorrow morning at 9 am you'd definitely notice.
Delphi was launched decades after COBOL and so of course had many more modern language concepts built into it. It also had a fantastic little IDE and in general was a more comfortable environment to work on (by way of being on a PC rather than a mainframe).
To really appreciate COBOL you should look at the entirety of the environment that it was used in rather (where batch processing was the norm and subroutines rather than function s where the code blocks) than to compare just the language features. You also may have noticed the occasional 'CALL' verb, which was COBOL's way of modularization.
I think that your impression of COBOL may have been a little bit clouded by that one job. I've seen some really readable COBOL, and given that the alternative was assembler and that those programs were patiently put together line-by-line on punched cards and never ever were refactored using an interactive editor should go a long way towards understanding why we make progress in little steps rather than in huge strides.
Delphi came into existence by way of Pascal, which is from the ALGOL family of languages, an entirely different branch on the tree of programming languages. Comparing Delphi with COBOL directly is not really very useful because you'd be comparing a language made for interactive applications on PCs in the late 80's with a language made for batch applications on mainframes in the 60's. The 20 years in between were the most important years for the IT industry when it comes to language development.