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Comment by 082349872349872

24 days ago

One of the rumoured stigma is that the object-oriented flavour of COBOL goes by the unwieldy name of ADD ONE TO COBOL YIELDING COBOL.

At least it doesn't have the unrumoured stigma of older FORTRANs, which ignored whitespace, allowing:

    DO 10 I=1.10

to silently compile an assignment:

    DO10I = 1.10

instead of signalling an error for the syntax of the loop the flight software programmer had intended:

    DO 10 I=1,10

13 comments

082349872349872

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skissane  23 days ago

> One of the rumoured stigma is that the object-oriented flavour of COBOL goes by the unwieldy name of ADD ONE TO COBOL YIELDING COBOL.

Which is a joke. Rather than an extension, the COBOL standard itself incorporates OO support, since COBOL 2002. The COBOL standards committee began work on the object-oriented features in the early 1990s, and by the mid-1990s some vendors (Micro Focus, Fujitsu, IBM) were already shipping OO support based on drafts of the COBOL 2002 standard. Unfortunately, one problem with all the COBOL standards since COBOL 85 (2002, 2014 and 2023), is no vendor ever fully implements them. In part that is due to lack of market demand, in part it is because NIST stopped funding its freely available test suite after COBOL 85, which removed a lot of the pressure on vendors to conform to the standard.

userbinator  23 days ago

No one seems to have written a Minecraft server in FORTRAN yet... but I think your comment just gave some people here ideas.

  • shiroiushi  23 days ago

    Instead of FORTRAN, someone should try writing a Minecraft server in something like ALGOL or FORTH.

    • superdisk  23 days ago

      Algol 68 actually isn't too bad of a language to work with, and there's a modern interpreter easily available. Unfortunately it lacks all support for reading and manipulating binary data so I think a Minecraft server would be nearly impossible.