"STOP RUN."
How computer-ish. What else is it going to do at the end of the program?
I'd find it hard to work in a programming language that's all upper case and shouting.
How computer-ish. What else is it going to do at the end of the program?
I'd find it hard to work in a programming language that's all upper case and shouting.
Here's a story for you.
Back in '02 when I was learning COBOL in school, the absolute worst sin you could commit was forgetting that STOP RUN or the period following it. If you did that, the mainframe would crash, and nobody could continue working on their assignments until somebody had called the operator and gotten them to reset the mainframe. The night before assignments were due, they had to pay someone overtime to stay up and be ready to hit the switch at any time because of this. And, of course, if you hadn't saved in a while, you lost your work.
At some point, we either found or were given a local IDE, which we then used to write code that we tested on the mainframe afterwards, and it was a game-changer. But also, the IDE used a later and better version of COBOL than the mainframe, so sometimes you'd write an instruction that worked locally and blew up on the mainframe, and you'd have to rewrite your whole everything to get around missing basic control flow structures.
IBM still churns out new releases of the programming language, where they keep tacking on support for all the things programmers of today want to do.