Hacker News Reader

IBM mainframes also do/did hardware BCD arithmetic, starting with System/360.

And as for COBOL not lending itself to structure, how did Structured COBOL exist, then? I wrote lots of COBOL without a single GO TO anywhere in the code.

View on HN

I'd wager the version of COBOL GP used was older. I learned COBOL in the 90s on a personal PC, and it allowed structured programs then. No spaghetti code needed, just PERFORMs and strategically placed periods. Even a program with GOTOs could be made be structured.

I learned structured programming using COBOL in the 1970s on a Xerox Sigma 6 and went on to use it on Burroughs Medium Systems (B3500/B4800).

Well, what I was using was called Burroughs COBOL. I was using it on minicomputers, but it was basically the same COBOL that ran on the big Burroughs mainframes. Mainframes needed to maintain backward compatibility, so I guess the COBOL I was using was 1st-generation.

I gave up COBOL before I ever encountered any Structured COBOL. Around that time I performed psychological repression of all memory I had of the language, or even that I'd used it.

It has taken years of programming-language therapy for me to start to recover these memories.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com