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Walt Mankowski is a recovering ivory tower computer scientist who recently completed a postdoc working with biologists to process and visualize terabytes of 2D and 3D time lapse microscope images. In his past life he spent 10 years as a COBOL programmer at a major cable home shopping network. He enjoys Perl, regular expressions, high-performance computing, and Futurama.
Authored Comments
That's bizarre! I can't say I've ever heard of any programming language that didn't support ELSE. If you wanted to do the equivalent of ELSE, did you have to repeat the IF with the negation of the condition? Did your COBOL run on a mainframe or on some other platform?
I went to Penn in the early 80s. I never used punch cards, but there was still a lot of old hardware that was gradually being phased out. But I was really talking about the very early days of COBOL. Computer terminals didn't start to be available until the early 70s, and COBOL had already been in use for a decade by then. Teletypes were around earlier, but I'm not sure how well they'd work with mainframes since all the ones I ever saw required a bisync connection.
Today when I program in languages like C++, Perl, or Python, I'll often wonder if there's a better way I could be coding something. Should I use a hash or an object? A structure or a class? A loop or a list comprehension? I never did that in COBOL, because there usually was only one way to do anything. It might not be a great way, but it's how you did it. And so most of my energy was devoted to solving business problems instead of language problems. Of course it also gets frustrating when you know there are all these better ways to do things, but sometimes a lack of options can help focus the mind. :)