In article , lgb wrote:

Back in the early days, I had at least one job that required writing
Cobol programs. I was told my Cobol looked like Fortran :-).
Apparently most people didn't even know Cobol had a COMPUTE statement.

No, we just *wish* it didn't. Destroys readability. Except for Fortran
programmers. :-)

But the one that *really* doesn't belong in the language is ALTER. One place I
once interviewed at told me that they have only one programming standard in
the shop: use ALTER, get fired.

BTW, I know COBOL gets a lot of bad press, but it's still one of the
easiest languages to get a novice producing working code. Excepting
RPG, of course.

Yeah, but it still takes a long time to get them producing *good* code. :-)

And I do have fond memories of the "MOVE CORRESPONDING" statement.

That's another one that IMO should never be used. It's *far* too easy for
seemingly innocuous changes in the structure of a group item to produce
disaster. The other argument against it is that, while it saves development
time, it wastes maintenance effort as the programmer has to look at both data
structures, *carefully*, to see what gets moved and what doesn't. And since
maintenance typically consumes 80 to 90% of a program's life-cycle cost,
anything that saves development time at the expense of maintenance time is a
bad practice.

--
Regards,
Doug Miller (alphageek at milmac dot com)

Nobody ever left footprints in the sands of time by sitting on his butt.
And who wants to leave buttprints in the sands of time?