[Info-vax] COBOL example $MGBLSC

[Arne Vajhøj]

On 9/9/2023 11:36 AM, bill wrote:
> On 9/9/2023 10:26 AM, Arne Vajhøj wrote:
>> On 9/9/2023 10:20 AM, Jan-Erik Söderholm wrote:
>>> Den 2023-09-09 kl. 16:02, skrev Dave Froble:
>>>> On 9/9/2023 9:29 AM, Jan-Erik Söderholm wrote:
>>
>>>>> "Throughout this manual, and except where specific rules apply, the
>>>>> hyphen (-) and the underline (_) are treated as the same character
>>>>> in a user-defined word."
>>>>
>>>> I guess that could be compared to "case insensitive", but while I 
>>>> consider case sensitivity to be less than reasonable, I find the 
>>>> above to be really stupid. Sure makes searching for specific words 
>>>> in a program complex.
>>>>
>>>> Got to understand Bill's objection to such.
>>>
>>> Stupid or not, it was not known to Bill and created that
>>> wrong comment of being two differnt symbols. I just showed
>>> that they are probably handled as the same symbol.
>>>
>>> That doesn't mean that I disagree with you... :-)
>>
>> Old languages sometimes has some rules that appears
>> very weird, because the expectation today is determined
>> by how a hundred newer languages has agreed on doing things
>> a different way.
>>
>> Take as an example this perfectly valid Fortran 77 program:
>>
>>        program weird
>>        integer*4 abc
>>        abc = 123
>>        write(*,*) abc
>>        write(*,*) a b c
>>        write(*,*) a     b     c
>>        end
>>
>> WTF??
> 
> As an old school Fortran programmer as well as COBOL (Fortran was my
> second language other than various assemblers) all I see in this is
> that you don't understand Fortran.  That is a perfectly valid, not
> weird at all, program.  If you wanted it to treat "a", "b" and "c"
> as separate and distinct variables you should have used commas as the
> the language expects.  Spaces in that context are meaningless.  :-)

Today it is considered weird that you can insert arbitrary
spaces in variable names.

Arne