[Gambas-user] OT:Very nice compliments for gambas :))

[Philip A. Chapman]

Michael Sullivan wrote:
> Text has to be entered in specific column positions?  Sounds like RPG
> (unfortunately it has nothing to do with popular games like Final
> Fantasy.)  I had to take a semester of RPG at college a few years ago. 
> It was easy, sort of.  It seemed mostly stupid, since I also learned VB
> and COBOL at that college  I really hated the column restriction
> though...
> 

COBOL has column restrictions too.

# columns 1-6: line number
# column 7: line continuation or empty
# columns 8-11: division, section and paragraph labels
# columns 12-72: code
# columns 73-80: comments

Other restrictions which are hold-over from the punch card days:

# Commands can't be longer then 61 characters, or they must be continued
   using a \ character in column 72.
# Only capital letters can be used. Some characters in the ASCII range
   0-32 are normal characters for COBOL

RPG and COBOL both date back to the days when people used punch cards to 
enter programs into a computer rather than a keyboard.  Column 
limitations were usefull when using punch cards.  Unfortunately, the 
languages still exist, though punch cards do not.

-- 
Philip A. Chapman

Application Development:
Java, Visual Basic (MCP), PostgreSQL, MySQL, MSSQL
Linux, Windows 9x, Windows NT, Windows 2000, Windows XP
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