Viewing profile — waltman

Exploiting your opponent's weaknesses seems like a perfectly cromulent strategy to me, whether your opponent is made of meat or silicon. Go humans!

Sure. My point was just that it's more difficult than it seems. Also this would mean that lines like add x to y giving z become something like cobol_add_giving(&a, &b, &c); which i…

It’s certainly possible; after all, the GnuCOBOL compiler is written in C. A large part of every COBOL program tends to be simple move and arithmetic statements that seem like they…

It's also solved by modern editors that do syntax highlighting. Both emacs and vim flagged that period as an error when I was working on the example in the article. But sadly the e…

When I wrote the article I didn't have access to code I worked on 2 decades ago, and if I did I couldn't have used it in the article anyway. This was indented to illustrate the pro…

I'm the author of the article, and I linked to the source of those numbers. The numbers seem reasonable to me too for the same reasons dcminter gave. One other reason is COBOL is a…

I'm the author of the article, and to be honest the only reason I did it this way was to make sure the period ended up in column 73. I've presented this in talks about half a dozen…

My experience with COBOL was on Stratus computers running the VOS operating system. This was a better environment than mainframes, but I'm still ambivalent about the language.

It's certainly true that there's a lot of boilerplate verbosity involved in reading files in COBOL. But once you've done that, parsing out the fields will likely be much simpler th…

COBOL structures are better for fixed-length strings than C structs are because C really prefers strings do be null terminated. In C you've got to specify the length of each string…

That 72-character limit came about because the most popular IBM punch card reader at the time COBOL was being written could only read 72 of the 80 characters on a card. Once you kn…