I don't mean this in a critical way, but how did you come to even use these in the same sentence? Apart from both being procedural languages, they have almost nothing in common. Pascal was the (or at least one of the) major CIS "language(s) of instruction" from sometime in the mid- or late-70s through not sure when, but at least the latter 80s..., but never really made it out of the classroom, despite a certain amount of effort to adapt it for commercial use. (And it did achieve a sort of posthumous quasi-commercial existence in Ada, its direct descendant.)I remember Pascal. Never got to Cobol.
I don't mean this in a critical way, but how did you come to even use these in the same sentence? Apart from both being procedural languages, they have almost nothing in common. Pascal was the (or at least one of the) major CIS "language(s) of instruction" from sometime in the mid- or late-70s through not sure when, but at least the latter 80s..., but never really made it out of the classroom, despite a certain amount of effort to adapt it for commercial use. (And it did achieve a sort of posthumous quasi-commercial existence in Ada. which was a direct descendant.)
Cobol on the other hand was never (really) a CS-as-academic-or-research-field "tool" and as far as academic/geek-y IT types have been concerned, has been "ancient history" for decades now. But thanks to its initially massive installed base in the various financial industries, I believe it still lives on in a surprisingly large number of installations even now, more than 50 years after its introduction...
Did a lot of my early programming in Pascal... those were the days...
Yikes - COBOL was actually required in a mid-80s program? Assembly language I can certainly understand (at that time, and even though I myself wouldn't have wanted to take it for a grade, not being a CIS major/student), but COBOL? Even by then, it was of interest almost only to programmers maintaining existing software bases...Way back in the mid 80's I enrolled in a 2 year "Computing Technologies" program at a College. Pascal was the Introductory Language. Cobol along with C and one or 2 other Languages were part of the 2nd Year. I dropped out after the first year, I blame Assembly Code which was part of the 1st Year and I just couldn't wrap my head around it and spent too much time trying, causing me to fail a bunch of Classes instead of just that one.
It certainly was that. So damned nicely structured, in fact, that without serious mods from the original specs, it was damned near useless for real-world applications... I will say it has the relatively unique status (for me) of being one of the few non-cheap commercial software packages I've ever paid full price for. I might even still have the relatively early-version Borland compiler floppies (5.25" of course) sitting around on a closet shelf somewhere...<lol>It was a nifty language. Nicely structured
Yikes - COBOL was actually required? Assembly language I can understand (even though I wouldn't have wanted to take it for a grade, not being a CIS major/student), but COBOL? Even by then, it was of interest almost only to programmers maintaining existing software bases...
It certainly was that. So damned nicely structured, in fact, that without serious mods from the original specs, it was damned near useless for any real word applications...
Well, no, not really, even as a sweeping generalization that's not really accurate. COBOL wasprobably the most dominant mainframe high-level programming language, and I imagine Fortran was pretty popular in more scientific fields that used mainframes (weather forecasting, hardcore statistical analysis, maybe military applications), but I think most lower-level "supervisory" system programming, plus a good chunk of applications software, was written in the the many variations of assembler that evolved over the years, including the so-called "high-level assemblers" that almost look more like "high-level" languages than they do their "true" assembler predecessors. ("Supercomputers" were of course their own separate thing and frankly, I have no idea what most of them were programmed with (if not assembler), but I'd very surprised if they were commonly programmed in C, at least not anything even resembling "standard" Cs.)Most of the Programming was for Mainframes, C was for PCs.
Well, no, not really, even as a sweeping generalization that's not really accurate. COBOL wasprobably the most dominant mainframe high-level programming language, and I imagine Fortran was pretty popular in more scientific fields that used mainframes (weather forecasting, hardcore statistical analysis, maybe military applications), but I think most lower-level "supervisory" system programming, plus a good chunk of applications software, was written in the the many variations of assembler that evolved over the years, including the so-called "high-level assemblers" that almost look more like "high-level" languages than they do their "true" assembler predecessors. ("Supercomputers" were of course their own separate thing and frankly, I have no idea what most of them were programmed with (if not assembler), but I'd very surprised if they were commonly programmed in C, at least not anything even resembling "standard" Cs.)
And C was a relative late-comer to the minicomputer/PC world. It was very heavily used in academic and "pure" computer science research circles, but on the flipside of Pascal's extremely structured approach, C was just too damned loosey-goosey for the commercial settings mainframes dominated. One of the most significant features of mainframe installations was (and is) their fault-tolerance and the ability to stay up and running, come hell or high water, for years on end. For fairly obvious reasons, C really just doesn't lend itself to that. For a long time Basic was actually a very popular PC programming language. Compilers were developed for it pretty early on, and by the time it fell into disuse, it had evolved well beyond its early "basic", interpreted-language roots...
Ah, I misunderstood what you were saying. I'm actually kinda surprised (again) that the C programming was done on a PC versus the VAX, though, considering that C was so thoroughly integrated into VMS, whereas (as I only vaguely recall at this point) it wasn't easy to find a really good C compiler for PCs even as late as that. I guess that wouldn't have really mattered for an intro course, anyway, it just seems kinda ass-backwards...I meant as far as the Course was concerned. Everything was done on a Vax Mainframe, except C was PC exclusive.
Heh. The very idea of even trying to switch over to anything else - if COBOL weren't actually well-suited to that specific field to begin with - is enough to make the whole Y2K thing seem like one of the slower days at a government office during Christmas week...COBOL is alive in banking industries. Without COBOL there is no existence of financial institutions and banks.There ar billlions of lines of code written in COBOL. When you swipe the credit card, the back end processing uses COBOL and mainframes. Without COBOL, credit card business will not exist.
Ah, I misunderstood what you were saying. I'm actually kinda surprised (again) that the C programming was done on a PC versus the VAX, though, considering that C was so thoroughly integrated into VMS, whereas (as I only vaguely recall at this point) it wasn't easy to find a really good C compiler for PCs even as late as that. I guess that wouldn't have really mattered for an intro course, anyway, it just seems kinda ass-backwards...
Heh. The very idea of even trying to switch over to anything else - if COBOL weren't actually well-suited to that specific field to begin with - is enough to make the whole Y2K thing seem like one of the slower days at government office during Christmas week...
I imagine Fortran was pretty popular in more scientific fields that used mainframes (weather forecasting, hardcore statistical analysis, maybe military applications
Well, yeah, there's always that. Though I'm actually not entirely sure to what extent Ada actually went into real-(military)-world usage at all, after they'd spent all those millions of dollars developing and testing it... Wouldn't surprise me in the least if they just moved on to something else...<hmm> I think it got to where it was used for at least some embedded systems, but I pretty much stopped paying attention after a while. But when I mentioned Fortran, I was thinking about stuff like calculating trajectories and other "non-field" usage, and before Ada was "finished" (if it ever was, in fact, completely finished...), which certainly hadn't happened as of the mid-80s...I thought that the military used Ada, because... well... they are the government and they felt that they needed to be different for job security.
Ada was mandated by the DoD from 1991 to 1997.Well, yeah, there's always that. Though I'm actually not entirely sure to what extent Ada actually went into real-(military)-world usage at all, after they'd spent all those millions of dollars developing and testing it... Wouldn't surprise me in the least if they just moved on to something else...<hmm>
Wow, a wholeAda was mandated by the DoD from 1991 to 1997.
Turbo Pascal was the best ! Pity Boreland was killed by Lotus FUD. I had to take a coarse in Cobol it was the worse (now I know why banks suck). If we are going to talk about Cobol and Pascal should we include Fortran and ada (oops we did). Then there was modula but i dont' remember it catching on. Anyway just remember that Turbo Pascal was the best !
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btw I think folks still use fortran; at least in 95 when I had to help some folks with water modeling project they were using fortran. Lovely british lass had the most common bug - she made her line too long so the last character of her variable was chopped off changing the name of the variable