Python and COBOL

[John W. Baxter]

In article <oqn1hxaulp.fsf at titan.progiciels-bpi.ca>, François Pinard 
<pinard at iro.umontreal.ca> wrote:

> [Alex Martelli]
> 
> > The power of Cobol (and, ok, some SQL on the side) was simply _awesome_
> > compared with the living hell that it was to make CSP do anything even
> > slightly different from what its designers (?) had in mind...
> 
> I once told a friend (Hrvoje, I think), that one strange adventure has 
> been
> for me to use a COBOL program to generate assembler meant for PPU 
> COMPASS.
> Some might remember PPUs were the system-specific processors within the
> old CDC-6600.  My employer, at the time, asked me for various horrors in
> rather quick succession, and I did not stay there for very long :-).


Hmmm...I would have expected a CDC shop to use Fortran for that.  

(The CDC Fortran was wonderous to behold.  In one test, a decent Fortran 
programmer and a top-drawer assember programmer were assigned the same 
non-trivial program to write.  The Fortran was done in under a month.  
The assember was done in two months...then the assembly-language guy 
spent about 4 more months tuning until he managed to get the performance 
to very slightly exceed the performance of the Fortran version, which 
hadn't been touched.)

Ah, well.

  --John (whose instructor in an NCR language which had been a joint 
CDC-NCR language was from CDC, and had watched the above test from the 
sidelines)

-- 
John W. Baxter   Port Ludlow, WA USA  jwbnews at scandaroon.com