[Info-vax] Teaching, was: Re: Any stronger versions of the LMF planned ?

[Simon Clubley]

On 2021-08-12, Lawrence D?Oliveiro <lawrencedo99 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Then, a decade or two later, came along these things called ?relational databases?, which were enthusiastically adopted by businesses--the very market that COBOL was supposedly optimized for.
>
> But it turns out the best way to interface to a relational DBMS is to generate SQL query strings. And for that, you need decent string handling, with facilities for format substitution, argument quoting and the like. None of which were envisaged in the original design of COBOL.
>

Are you kidding me ????? :-( :-( Is that what is taught in university ? :-(

If _that_ is what is being taught today then that is a perfect example of
how teaching and teachers are completely out of touch with the real world.

You need to learn the SQL syntax and how to apply it to applications but
you should be using a parameter based API to actually build the SQL query.

The _only_ time building a SQL query string manually is acceptable is
if what you are using is so old that it does not support parameter based
SQL statements.

In university, you should be taught the parameter based approach first
and only then told that on some old systems you may need to construct
the SQL query manually and there should then be a detailed discussion
about the security implications of doing that.

If this isn't being done then that is a perfect example of how university
teaching is utterly out of touch with the real world.

> So today, even a language like Python, Perl or (spit) PHP would be a better fit for ?business needs? than COBOL ...

How well do these languages handle decimal data ?

There's a reason why that is the preferred format in business applications.

Simon.

-- 
Simon Clubley, clubley at remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP
Walking destinations on a map are further away than they appear.