> Taking recursion away seems like an unnecessary limitation
Modern Cobol doesn't seem to have this limitation, eg http://publibz.boulder.ibm.com/cgi-bin/bookmgr_OS390/handhel.... When Cobol originally appeared, call stacks weren't standard, Lisp didn't exist yet, and neither Fortran nor Algol supported recursive functions; it made sense at the time.
Ohhhhhh, of course!
Gosh, thanks. I sometimes hold historical technology to unfair standards because I'm not thinking about the continuity of it all.
Crazy to think twenty-somethings are out there hacking COBOL!
> how much power
Do not forget that when COBOL was created mainframes were less powerful than today's microcontrollers.
Re:It’s COBOL all the way down
by blattimwind on Tuesday May 01, 2018 @08:22AM
(#16966390)
Recursive and iterative functions have the same computational power.
And every computable function can be expressed in Brainfuck. That doesn't mean that some algorithms are a lot more elegantly expressed when your language supports recursion.
Re:It’s COBOL all the way down
by joshuaduffy on Tuesday May 01, 2018 @08:20AM
(#16966375)
Correct. They are called subroutines in COBOL.
Maybe someone who writes cobol could chime in on this.