"Bob LeChevalier" <lojbab at lojban.org> wrote in message
news:jgv8ju4mpovmiqp7htdsb8gee0013a8sbf at 4ax.com...
> >There ARE tremendous classified technologies which have been developed by
> >PRIVATE industry under government contracts which will remain classified
for
> >a long time, and which not even those companies can profit from in the
> >private sector. So, NO, Hopper was not an "inventor" of a blasted thing.
> >Bob Bemer, as an employee of IBM, WAS one of the "inventors" of Cobol,
but
> >the team of engineers behind Cobol's development goes throughout all of
IBM.
> >All Hopper did was sit their on the tail end of all the REAL inventions
and
> >look pretty [or in her case, real ugly].
>>http://www.cs.yale.edu/homes/tap/Files/hopper-story.html>http://cispom.boisestate.edu/cis221emaxson/hophtm.htm> each give a detailed history of Hopper's life and contributions to the
> industry. They back up with details what is meant when we say that she
> invented the compiler (1949) and COBOL (1959).
>
This is from another forum which has been following this thread, with great
amusement:
---------------------------------------------------------------
John:
A little more about Mary Hopper taken from Shallow Dunce's politically
correct website at:http://www.sdsc.edu/ScienceWomen/hopper.html
"Where the hell have you been?" and pointed to his electromechanical Mark I
computing machine, saying "Here, compute the coefficients of the arc tangent
series by next Thursday."
John, this quote agrees with your statement that Hopper never "invented" the
Mark I computer.
I couldn't help but notice the next quote of the article, which by all
means, has to be indicative of the inverse of intelligence and proportional
to vile selfishness.
"Although her marriage was dissolved at this point, and though she had no
children, she did not resume her maiden name."
An intelligent woman would submit to her husband. Obviously, this didn't
happen. The jews were already spewing out their feminist lies by 1943, and
Hopper undoubtedly was deceived by them enough that her marriage was
dissolved. Thus, her lineage subsequently was terminated and became extinct,
all because of the jew lie of "career" over "children." You feminists will
learn twice the Laws of Yahweh. In your wretched, barren old age, you will
look back at the mistake you made. Again, when you are incarcerated by
Lucifer for your selfish transgressions against God.
---------------------------------------------------------------
Anyone who thinks the DOD, or any other government agency, has ever
"invented" anything really, really has not a clue about how grossly
inefficient and stupid government employees are, and how mixed up the
government is. You simply cannot operate under almost 4 decades of
affirmative action and expect to retain top employees, nor can you expect
advanced development to come out of government facilities.
IF there was any single person responsible for the development (not
"invention") of Cobol, it certainly was NOT any government employee or
agency. IBM, Sperry Rand, and Honeywell ALL had a hand in its development,
and it's their employees who hold all the patents and copyrights, not
feminazi Hopper who "found a bug in the computer".
Did Hopper, as a government employee, make a contribution to Cobol? Maybe.
Was her contribution any greater than hundreds of other government
employees, or thousands of other industry employees? Absolutely not, and if
you believe the feminazi LIES that she did, with nothing but their word on
it, that's your problem.
John Knight
http://cobolforgcc.sourceforge.net/cobol_2.html
2. COBOL Overview
Acknowledgement
COBOL Purpose
COBOL Good Points
COBOL Bad Points
2.1 Use of Material from the COBOL Standard
The following is reproduced from the COBOL Standard:
Acknowledgment
Any organization interested in reproducing the COBOL standard and
specifications in whole or in part, using ideas from this document as the
basis for an instruction manual or for any other purpose, is free to do so.
However, all such organizations are requested to reproduce the following
acknowledgment paragraphs in their entirety as part of the preface to any
such publication:
COBOL is an industry language and is not the property of any company or
group of companies, or of any organization or group of organizations. No
warranty, expressed or implied, is made by any contributor or by the CODASYL
COBOL Committee as to the accuracy and functioning of the programming system
and language. Moreover, no responsibility is assumed by any contributor, or
by the committee, in connection therewith.
The authors and copyright holders of the copyrighted materials used herein
FLOW-MATIC (trademark of Sperry Rand Corporation),
Programming for the UNIVAC (R) I and II, Data Automation Systems copyrighted
1958, 1959, by Sperry Rand Corporation;
IBM Commercial Translator Form No. F28-8013, copyrighted 1959 by IBM;
FACT, DSI 27A5260-2760, copyrighted 1960 by Minneapolis-Honeywell
have specifically authorized the use of this material, in whole or in part,
in the COBOL specifications. Such authorization extends to the reproduction
and use of COBOL specifications in programming manuals or similar
publications.
2.2 Purpose of COBOL
COBOL was a significant advance in the history of computer science, because
it opened up programming for many people who found assembler tedious or
difficult or both, and FORTRAN, ALGOL, LISP and kindred languages generally
unappealing. That is, people who were neither mathematicians nor computer
scientists.
It is particularly focussed on the writing of business logic and rules and
to this end has very good control over numerical calculations and the
associated rounding, as is needed for financial calculations.
Here is a quote from one of the inventors of COBOL (Jean Sammet, quoted in
"The Psychology of Computer Programmming" by Gerald M Weinberg):
"The users for who COBOL was designed were actually two subclasses of those
people concerned with business data processing problems. One is the
relatively inexperienced programmer for whom the naturalness of COBOL would
be an asset, while the other type of user would be essentially anybody who
had not written the program initially. In other words, the readibility of
COBOL programs would provide documentation to all who might wish to examine
the programs, including the supervisory or management personnel. Little
attempt was made to cater for professional programmers."
In fact of course almost all COBOL code is written by professional
programmers.
2.3 What's Good About COBOL?
More people can write COBOL than C/++. There is more COBOL code than
probably any other language.
The language limits to some extent the trouble you can get yourself into.
It has better support for decimal arithmetic than most other languages. You
can achieve a precisely defined truncation or rounding result for your
calculations, even with large values. This is important when money is
involved.
It runs well on mainframes, which usually have extended instruction sets to
handle COBOL operations like decimal arithmetic.
The syntax does not look like line noise (like PERL) or swahili (like
Smalltalk or LISP). It is more self documenting. There is some evidence that
its 'verbose' nature makes it easier to understand programs quickly.
Lots of people know COBOL, and these people have a lot of knowledge about
the businesses they work in, and how to put together large mission critical
systems.
COBOL is one of the most successful languages of all time. Probably in fact
more money has been paid to people to write COBOL programs than any other
language.
Indeed there may be more COBOL code in existence than any other language.
This means that much of the Intellectual Property of business is embedded in
COBOL programs.
2.4 What's Bad About COBOL?
In fact COBOL breaks almost every conventional rule of programming languages
design. Compare it to the criteria listed in "The Psychology of Computer
Programming" -
It is non-uniform. Handling of spaces is inconsistent. There are at least
three different kinds of expressions allowed in different contexts. There
are inconsistencies in the use of noise words like 'are' - sometimes they
are required, sometimes is/are are substitutable, other times not. Large
numbers of useful names are reserved words. It is hard to avoid clashing
with reserved words.
It is not compact, in two ways. It is by far the largest language in regular
use. In addition, programs written in COBOL are generally 2-3 times larger
than a corresponding program in C.
It is not local and linear. All the variable names are up the top of the
program, leading to the excessive use of global variables and other bad
habits. Nested programs largely resolves this problem but many shops do not
allow use of nested programs. There are heaps of reserved words, all over
the place.
It works poorly outside its preferred domain - coding business logic. For
example many systems programming features such as logical operations, basic
binary data items, pointers etc are missing from the (standard) language.
In the new draft standard (COBOL 2002) most things get better and one or two
get worse (eg reserved word list).
