It’s a pretty saturday morning and I am in very jolly mood. Thought I’d share some joy ;-)
In 1959, there was COBOL
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ADD YEARS TO AGE. MULTIPLY PRICE BY QUANTITY GIVING COST. SUBTRACT DISCOUNT FROM COST GIVING FINAL-COST. MULTIPLY B BY B GIVING B-SQUARED. MULTIPLY 4 BY A GIVING FOUR-A. MULTIPLY FOUR-A BY C GIVING FOUR-A-C. SUBTRACT FOUR-A-C FROM B-SQUARED GIVING RESULT-1. COMPUTE RESULT-2 = RESULT-1 ** .5. SUBTRACT B FROM RESULT-2 GIVING NUMERATOR. MULTIPLY 2 BY A GIVING DENOMINATOR. DIVIDE NUMERATOR BY DENOMINATOR GIVING X. |
And almost 50 years later, it resurrected !
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Scenario: savings account has insufficient funds Given my savings account balance is $50 And my checking account balance is $10 When I transfer $60 from savings to checking Then my savings account balance should be $50 And my checking account balance should be $10 |
I know history repeats itself. I just wish it wouldn’t have done it in English !
Heh. I saw this one coming when I saw the InfoQ link to PragDave’s article. I’m just curious if you came up with the COBOL analogy on yr own or just riffing on Dafydd Rees’ comment: http://pragdave.blogs.pragprog.com/pragdave/2008/03/the-language-in.html#comment-106672576, which predates this post by over two weeks. Zing! [Wink.]
Har har har ;-) Very funny.
The big difference between the two would, of course, be that the second one isn’t a programming language, it can be set up to read exactly the way you want it – so rather than constraining you to an archaic generic syntax, it allows you to create the syntax that’s best suited to integration-testing your application.
But it’s not like this post is serious or anything… ;-)
Daniel
CodeRay doesn’t have COBOL syntax highlighting??
Actually the COBOL code comes straight from Wikipedia. The first three lines are good code (I know I coded them). The remaining lines are code that no proper COBOL coder would write. A var should not be named A or B, and the results of a calculation should never be named Result-1..and so on.