A Historical Perspective on COBOL (2020)

Re:A Historical Perspective on COBOL (2020) by ASalazarMX on Friday May 07, 2021 @04:57PM (#27080780)

I'd wager the version of COBOL GP used was older. I learned COBOL in the 90s on a personal PC, and it allowed structured programs then. No spaghetti code needed, just PERFORMs and strategically placed periods. Even a program with GOTOs could be made be structured.

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Re:A Historical Perspective on COBOL (2020) by denton-scratch on Thursday May 13, 2021 @05:20PM (#27147624)

Well, what I was using was called Burroughs COBOL. I was using it on minicomputers, but it was basically the same COBOL that ran on the big Burroughs mainframes. Mainframes needed to maintain backward compatibility, so I guess the COBOL I was using was 1st-generation.

I gave up COBOL before I ever encountered any Structured COBOL. Around that time I performed psychological repression of all memory I had of the language, or even that I'd used it.

It has taken years of programming-language therapy for me to start to recover these memories.

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Re:A Historical Perspective on COBOL (2020) by DoomHotel on Friday May 07, 2021 @09:48PM (#27082874)

I learned structured programming using COBOL in the 1970s on a Xerox Sigma 6 and went on to use it on Burroughs Medium Systems (B3500/B4800).

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