Rich kids are into COBOL

[Chuck Guzis]

On 02/18/2015 07:56 PM, William Donzelli wrote:
> I would not call the CHM 1401 a production machine.
>
> There might be a System/3 still in real service (at least there was
> about four or five years ago).

The point is that COBOL, FORTRAN, Algol, etc. get a bad rap.  Look what 
they had to run on--you can't do that with C or several other more 
contemporary languages.

Which brings up the question "Do you design a machine to run a language 
or design a language to run on a machine?"  That appears to have changed 
over the last 30-40 years.  Are we poorer for that?

The financial world didn't seem to mind decimal machines.  Are we going 
to make a dollar (or Euro) equal to 128 cents to accommodate radix-2 
machines?

--Chuck