Awatmath.2356 net.followup utzoo!decvax!watmath!jcwinterton Mon May 10 13:17:18 1982 re: Chan on Dijkstra Re: Dijkstra's Flames. WRT Don Chan's article of above title, it is neces- sary to say that it is true that programming could be more for- mal. However, I do not subscribe to the idea that programming is at all mathematical except that some programs do a consider- able amount of arithmetic. Programming is more analytic logic than anything else. Also, unless a program specification ex- ists ists in an inviolable condition, you can never be sure of correctness. In real world programming, the specification of a program is often very fluid as the needs of the user change, and since the user is usually the guy with the purse strings, you do what he wants. Careless, non-modular program- ming can make this into a real mare's nest, and this has fi- nally been recognized by the academic community. Programming as a science will never be as rigorous as one of the physical sciences simply because the objects are generally fluid. More work on formal methods of approach is definitely needed, but we must all be careful not to go chasing off into the wild blue yonder trying to find the programming language to end all programming languages that can produce verified programs which run reliably as soon as they will pass to the code genera- tion phase of the compiler. Many programs never produce "correct" results. Often, it is sufficient to produce acceptable results. People who denigrate COBOL, PL/1 and FORTRAN are denying the inevitable. These languages are here to stay, and nothing will replace them in the foreseeable future. The reason is very practical, and it is investment. Millions of dollars have been spent writing programs in these languages and, due to gen- eral conservatism, will remain in these languages. At one time, I worked for a company that capitlaized their programs as assets and depreciated them as if they were equipment or furniture. It took a long time to convince them that this was poor practice, as the life-expectancy of any given version of a program appears to be somewhere between three and nine months. Another point about the "commercial" language detrac- tors is that very few of them have ever written a serious pro- gram in any of the three except, perhaps, FORTRAN. It is only natural that anyone who has had exposure to ALGOL based languages would learn to hate FORTRAN with a passion. Lumping COBOL into the same class is, however, a gross error. COBOL was designed to complement FORTRAN (used by engineers and scientists) for use by the business world for accounting pur- poses. It has served this purpose well and faithfully, turning most major commercial computers into printing presses. COBOL does, however, do something that many of the "nice" languages do not do, and that is define I/O very carefully and with a real ef- fort at being useful. John Winterton. ----------------------------------------------------------------- gopher://quux.org/ conversion by John Goerzen of http://communication.ucsd.edu/A-News/ This Usenet Oldnews Archive article may be copied and distributed freely, provided: 1. There is no money collected for the text(s) of the articles. 2. The following notice remains appended to each copy: The Usenet Oldnews Archive: Compilation Copyright (C) 1981, 1996 Bruce Jones, Henry Spencer, David Wiseman.