In article <
j41eek...@mid.individual.net>,
>Doc, I really enjoy some of the stuff you say here but I have
>to admit that I haven't a clue what you just said. Or what it
>has to do with COBOL. :-)
And still a most gracious compliment, Mr Gunshannon... thanks! One of the
innovations of COBOL had to do with the way it described and dealt with
files; a decent coder could do a three-file merge that was maintainable by
other programmers in a way that hadn't been, before. Likewise,
alternate-index access was an easy and wonderful thing to do.
We'd also code, go out, grab dinner, drink, talk about work, drink some
more... and then be hit with A Revelation and rush back to the office to
pound the keyboards. Did you never write code after a couple-some jolts
o' hooch and a missed night's sleep?
I did... and that code - like yours - is still running on Vital Systems.
Nowadays everything's in 'a table' and accessed via Structured Query
Language (SQL). This is how youngsters are taught in technical schools
and universities, there's no need to learn where records in relation to
each other because the Relational Database Management System (RDBMS) takes
care of all of that for you.
Computers are ubiquitous and cheap; back in the Oldene Dayse huge, wealthy
government agencies would squabble with each other over who gets the
latest gear out of Armonk (N.Y., the former headquarters of IBM). Back in
those ancient times there was a disagreement over a machine (for which
armies of young, buzz-cut men in white shirts and neckties) that was
ordered by the Social Security Agency and the Department of Defense. The
DoD got that box by invoking 'national security' (gotta beat them
Russkies!) and that 'theft' of equipment for their own COBOL-coders still
rankled people as Social Security a third of a century later.
The magnetic tapes that SSA used - and, probably still uses - were
physically deterioriating, literally crumbling before one's eyes, but each
one had pieces of paper (likewise wilting) with descriptions like (pardon
the tabs)
SSN Social Security Number 1 9 Num
F-NAM Name, First 10 15 Alph
M-NAM Name, Middle (opt) 16 15 Alph
L-NAM Name, Last 32 25 Alph
EMPID Employee ID (opt) 58 8 Num
... and anybody trained in COBOL can code up an FD or an SD while
half-drunk after a sleepless night.
It's a way of seeing the world frozen into the time, tools and technology
of the late 1950s. To a bright, fresh youngster born in the mid-1990s it
is 'old and complicated'...
... while to the dinosaurs who still walk this glorious, sunny earth it
makes perfect sense, it's solid as a rock, processes hundreds of millions
of transactions in a twenty-minute window (I remember Mr Trembley) and
doesn't get touched for fun, fancy or fashion.
Write the code in 1985 according to the '68 standard and make sure the
word-alignment optimises storage (out of habit). Get it into Prod.
Recompile it for Y2K in 1997. And yet it still runs. (Hi, Galileo!)
I hope this clarifies things and I appreciate the time you've spent with
me on it.
DD