The K&R bible on the language came out in 1978, 2nd
ed about a decade later. Still have the 2nd ed on my
shelf and DO look up stuff in it from time to time.
Most of my code still has a very K&R look and feel.
I was writing 'C' on the original IBM-PCs in the mid
80s, and with Aztec 'C' for CP/M-80 around the same
timeframe (that's when IBM-PCs came with a DOS *and*
a CP/M-86 floppy :-) So, the language and its strengths
surely weren't UNKNOWN.
Admittedly 'C' was originally kind of part of the
Unix & PDP-11 sphere, more 'academia', so if yer bosses
didn't use or pay attention to anything like that then
it really might have escaped their notice. Pointy-haired
know-nothing bosses aren't anything new alas.
>>>> Yea, you could do it in BASIC too ... with lots of
>>>> DATA statements. I remember converting a Fortran
>>>> pgm to IBMPC BASIC, but had to work that newfangled
>>>> 8087 the hard way using DATA. 8087s are weird. Yuk !
>>>>
>>>> COBOL was deliberately made to do "business stuff" in a
>>>> super-wordy fashion that was SUPPOSED to be "self documenting".
>>>
>>> Agreed. That was the defining component of COBOL, and perhaps it's
>>> saving grace.
>>
>> Ummmmm ....
>>
>> Mostly I like "terse" languages - less typing and lots
>> of room left over for comments at the ends of the lines.
>> 'C' fits the bill pretty well. But you DO need the
>> comments because the syntax doesn't lend itself to a
>> quick read. 2/3rds of every 'C' program I do is comments,
>> from brief to expositions. That way I can come back to
>> it a few years later and sort-of figure out what I
>> was doing.
>
> This development occurred in a large (1000+ branch) banking environment.
I can understand the conservatism ... and having lots
of COBOL programmers around.
> When we got specs from the users, they were along the lines of
> you MULTIPLY the ACCOUNT BALANCE by the MONTHLY INTEREST RATE,
> giving the INTEREST ADJUSTMENT.
> you then ADD the INTEREST ADJUSTMENT to the ACCOUNT BALANCE,
> giving the ADJUSTED ACCOUNT BALANCE.
> which a programmer might convert into
> MULTIPLY ACCOUNT-BALANCE BY MONTHLY-INTEREST-RATE GIVING INTEREST-ADJUSTMENT.
> ADD INTEREST-ADJUSTMENT TO ACCOUNT-BALANCE GIVING ADJUSTED-ACCOUNT-BALANCE.
>
> The convenience was that the user's description /was/ the program code.
For straightforward lines ... but, kinda like with FORTRAN, when
you start to get into formatting the output PICs can get pretty
cryptic and un-intuitive and the sheer wordiness makes typos
more likely. "X++" is less wordy than "ADD 1 TO X" and you
can "x++" or "++x" instead of structuring it in in a COBOL pgm
I do notice that COBOL-related forums and help pages and
such are still kinda busy, so it's not remotely a dead
language. People are still writing/updating COBOL code.
FORTRAN is still pretty widely used also, esp in academic
and engineering environments, mostly due to the huge volume
of proven hard-core math routines which nobody wants to
re-write. Now BASIC ... does ANYBODY use BASIC anymore ?
USED to be THE introductory language ......
Anyway, I basically dropped COBOL and FORTRAN in favor of 'C'
(and Pascal) a long time ago. I think the 2nd version of Turbo
Pascal had straight-up math-coprocessor support and at the time
I was translating a lot of old FORTRAN statistics routines over
to the IBM-PCs for scientifics and stat-mongers. IBM-PC 'C' also
had 8087 libraries, but the TP environment made development a
LOT faster. Time a Fourier Transform with, and without, a math
coprocessor sometime :-)
After that, various micro-controller projects - 8051s/PICS, later
Arduino's and such ... mix of assembler and compiler-generated
code (esp for the very annoying serial-comm stuff).
>>>> Maybe the only language requiring more text than Java :-)
>>>
>>> Those of us who coded COBOL for a living kept a boilerplate^W
>>> template program handy, just so we didn't have to fill in all that
>>> language /just/ to get a program started.
>>
>> Now we just cut and paste from the internet :-)
>
> Yah. Sad, that.
I still sometimes buy actual BOOKS ... hard to hold three
different pages open at the same time on the net and flip
back and forth. Just ain't the same. I think the tangibility
of paper enhances memory too, multi-sensory association.
A lot easier to scribble notes circles and arrows on it too.
A lot of the code snippets you find on the net are kind of
defective too - or ONLY intended as demos. Takes a lot of
spiffing-up and expansion to put them into something real
but at LEAST you have a template to work with.