[Info-vax] COBOL example $MGBLSC

[Arne Vajhøj]

On 9/9/2023 12:47 PM, bill wrote:
> On 9/9/2023 12:15 PM, Arne Vajhøj wrote:
>> 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.
>>
> 
> That is all about parsing and really has nothing to do with the
> function of the language.

True.

But treating - as _ in Cobol (in some contexts) is also just parsing
and not function.

Arne