[erlang-questions] Style wars: junk comments

ok@REDACTED ok@REDACTED
Wed Sep 12 12:33:18 CEST 2012


> And COBOL's DIVISIONs made sense when you could get color-coded
> pre-punched DIVISION cards in the keypunch rooms, to save time typing
> and to help you see, from the top of the deck, which division was
> which. Also good back when a COBOL compiler might have five-to-eight
> passes, on a machine with 4K instruction space: you could write a
> customer parser for each pass.

COBOL doesn't have _that_ many DIVISIONs.
IDENTIFICATION, ENVIRONMENT, DATA, and PROCEDURE,
in COBOL 85.  In a program with a couple of hundred
lines, having those cards pre-punched saved practically
no time.  Using the colour-coded stock to punch
semantically-named SECTIONs made a lot more sense.






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