Which Digital Version of SC4D is Best?

[A Nonny Moose 8,262]

One of my earliest computer languages was BASIC, which I learned after COBOL, because I had gone to work for GE.  It was selling time-sharing and BASIC (Dartmouth version) was the language of choice except that real programmers used Algol-60.  I became more and more computer polyglot over the years and recently suffered though the tutorials for C#.  All these LR(k) languages are the same and none of them have the power of COBOL 2000+ which is not only an OOD/OOP language but is not at all context free and requires some serious work to make a compiler.  What other language can you say this in in one statement:

MULTIPLY A B C D GIVING E ROUNDED ON SIZE ERROR PERFORM OVERFLOW-ROUTINE.

Because this statement switches from being a straight assignment statement to a conditional, an LR(k) parser can't handle it.  It takes transition diagrams and the ability to backtrack.  To do this in modern LR(k) languages you need the TRY ... CATCH structure which is implicit in COBOL.  Here is another COBOL conundrum:

READ A RECORD.
WRITE SOMETHING.

With proper data definitions supporting this, this is a working pair of statements.  One hopes that this kind of thing is strictly a tongue-in-cheek example.
 

[InvisiChem 121]

and that shows why I have so much respect for more seasoned programmers.   As with all programmers, I have a pretty decent ego. But the seasoned programmers know how to push my knowledge. COBOL is one I have heard great things about. Unfortunately, unless you are reprogramming power plants or some very old school power systems, the language has been basically forgotten. The same is true of Fortran. 

[A Nonny Moose 8,262]

COBOL is a language of main frames.  There is still a large number of applications around, many of them bound up in proprietary transaction processing systems and essentially inconvertible to other languages because of the interface requirements.  FORTRAN on the other hand, should by now, be a goner along with PASCAL.  Both have unacceptable limitations.

Other than assembler, COBOL (61E) was my first high level language.  I worked as a programmer in the era where the whole idea of a business computer was developing.  COBOL, through its association with the standardizing body at the U.S. Naval Electronics Laboratory under the auspices of Adm. Grace Hopper became the language of choice for general business programming which generally consists of file/data base maintenance and reporting.  The punishment should fit the crime. COBOL is designed more for processing character strings than  doing sophisticated arithmetic, but is certainly capable of both.  The last dialect of COBOL I used as a programmer was COBOL'85, but I kept up for years with the CODASYL Journal of Development out of sheer interest.  If you really want to do OOD/OOP programming you need look no further than the current version of COBOL.

One of the most important features of COBOL is that it is supposed to be self-documenting.  That is, the syntax is a restricted form of English and responsible programmers are supposed to write their code so that a layman can understand it.  Unfortunately, urgency, egos, and other things have reduced this feature to uselessness. 

Short-hand languages such as C/C++ have replaced COBOL as a language of choice for teaching because it is brief.  C in fact, is so close to assembler that it is probably the first high level language implemented for any machine these days.  Most of the LR(k) languages around today (Java is an example) are simply derivatives of C.  Compilers for this kind of language are easy to construct because they are context free, which COBOL most certainly is not.

Let's see if I can list all the languages I have written working code in:  Assembler (several machines), COBOL (61E through 85), FORTRAN, FORTRAN-77, ALGOL-60, ALGOL-58, APL, PL/1, SQL (Worked on the standard), B, C/C++, BCPL, ADA, and several VHLLs that produced source in one of these including PYTHON.  I think that covers it, but there have been a lot of side trips down programming lane.

[CorinaMarie 29,895]

tip-toe

Shh...

Going to see if something I wrote a long, long time ago makes Granpa Moose nostalgic. (Don't anyone tip him off.) Oh, and it won't be anything like he'd of done hisself cause most of mine is self taught by what I saw on hard drives (many of them MFMs or RLLs), floppy disks, printouts, antique magazines. See, my dad sold carpet to like brand new buildings or being renovated ones. (Well, not to the buildings themselves, the money part prolly had humans involved.) And many times could dumpster dive without having to go that far. Like stuff scheduled to be tossed, but still in a room somewhere.

Anyhow, to make a short story longer, my dad also had a friend who ran his own small printing company and had this old cobol program he'd been using since Hector Was a Pup (my own granpa's saying). So, the transaction file had exceeded some limit or some such (I'd have to study my code a bit to be sure what all I had it do) and as a quick fix I purged it and gave him a blank one. (Later I did a retrieval bit that gave more sort and indexing and search stuff, but that's a whole nother story.

So, this is for you Granpa!

 

       IDENTIFICATION DIVISION.                                                 
       PROGRAM-ID.                                                              
           PURGE-TRANSACTION-FILE.                                        
      * This program assumes that the trans file & the trans.inx files
      * have been renamed to old & old.inx.  It also assumes that a
      * new empty trans & trans.inx have been created with RMCAL2.
      * The program will then read all records from old & write only
      * those after the end date to the new trans file.
       AUTHOR.                                                                  
           CORICOO                                                           
       INSTALLATION.                                                            
           XYZ COMPANY.                                             
       ENVIRONMENT DIVISION.                                                    
       CONFIGURATION SECTION.                                                   
       SOURCE-COMPUTER.    IBM-PC.                                           
       OBJECT-COMPUTER.    IBM-PC.                                           
       INPUT-OUTPUT SECTION.                                                    
       FILE-CONTROL.                                                            
       COPY "D:\COBOL\XYZ\TRANSSEL.COP".
       COPY "D:\COBOL\XYZ\OLDSEL.COP".

          SELECT BAD-FILE  ASSIGN TO       RANDOM "BAD"
                           ORGANIZATION IS INDEXED
                           ACCESS MODE IS  DYNAMIC
                           RECORD KEY IS   BAD-ID
                           FILE STATUS IS  BAD-STATUS.

       DATA DIVISION.
       FILE SECTION.
       FD  TRANS-FILE      LABEL RECORD STANDARD
                           DATA RECORD TRANS-REC.                           
       COPY "D:\COBOL\XYZ\TRANS.COP".

       FD  OLD-FILE        LABEL RECORD STANDARD
                           DATA RECORD OLD-REC.                             
       COPY "D:\COBOL\XYZ\OLD.COP".

       FD  BAD-FILE        LABEL RECORD STANDARD                                
                           DATA RECORD BAD-REC.
       01  BAD-REC.
           05  BAD-ID              PIC X(06).
           05  BAD-DATA            PIC X(170).

       WORKING-STORAGE SECTION.                                                 
       77  RESPONSE                PIC X.                                       
       77  REC-COUNT               PIC 999999  VALUE ZEROES.
       77  MOVE-COUNT              PIC 999999  VALUE ZEROES.
       77  DROP-COUNT              PIC 999999  VALUE ZEROES.
       77  WRITE-COUNT             PIC 999999  VALUE ZEROES.
       77  NUMBER-DISPLAY          PIC ZZZZZ9.
       77  OLD-STATUS              PIC XX    VALUE SPACES.                      
       77  TRANS-STATUS            PIC XX    VALUE SPACES.                      
       77  BAD-STATUS              PIC XX    VALUE SPACES.                      
       77  EDIT-COST               PIC 9(5)V99.
       77  BUFFER-COUNT            PIC 9(4)  VALUE ZEROES.
       77  PASS-WORD               PIC X(11).

       01  STATUS-CODE             PIC 9(4).                                    
       01  STAT-CODE REDEFINES STATUS-CODE.                                     
           05  STAT-KEY            PIC 99.                                      
           05  FKEY                PIC 99.                                      

       01  PURGE-DATE.
           05  PURGE-YR            PIC XX.
           05  PURGE-MO            PIC XX.
           05  PURGE-DA            PIC XX.

       PROCEDURE DIVISION.                                                      
       0000-START.                                                              
           DISPLAY "Transaction Purge Utility"
                                       LINE 02 POSITION 15 ERASE
                   "******** WARNING ********"
                                       LINE 05 POSITION 15 BLINK
                   "Be sure that you have renamed TRANS to OLD"
                                       LINE 07 POSITION 12
                   "and TRANS.INX to OLD.INX before starting."
                                       LINE 08 POSITION 12.

       0001-GET-PASSWORD.
           DISPLAY "Enter Password to proceed: "
                                       LINE 20 POSITION 10.
           ACCEPT PASS-WORD            LINE 20 POSITION 0
                                       PROMPT
                                       ON EXCEPTION FKEY
                                       GO TO 9001-CLOSE.
           IF PASS-WORD NOT = "3.1415927"
               GO TO 9001-CLOSE.

           DISPLAY "TRANSACTION PURGE UTILITY"
                                       LINE 02 POSITION 15
                                       ERASE.

           DISPLAY "Enter purge date:   /  /  "
                                       LINE 10 POSITION 10.

       0002-GET-PURGE-MO.
           ACCEPT PURGE-MO             LINE 10 POSITION 28
                                       NO BEEP PROMPT
                                       ON EXCEPTION FKEY
                                       GO TO 9001-CLOSE.

       0002-GET-PURGE-DA.
           ACCEPT PURGE-DA             LINE 10 POSITION 31
                                       NO BEEP PROMPT
                                       ON EXCEPTION FKEY
                                       GO TO 9001-CLOSE.

       0002-GET-PURGE-YR.
           ACCEPT PURGE-YR             LINE 10 POSITION 34
                                       NO BEEP PROMPT
                                       ON EXCEPTION FKEY
                                       GO TO 9001-CLOSE.

           MOVE PURGE-DATE TO OLD-DATE-RECEIVED.

           DISPLAY "Press 'Y' to begin: "
                                       LINE 12 POSITION 10.
           ACCEPT RESPONSE             LINE 12 POSITION 0.
           DISPLAY SPACE               LINE 12 POSITION 01
                                       ERASE EOL.

           IF RESPONSE NOT = "Y"
               GO TO 9001-CLOSE.

           OPEN I-O OLD-FILE.
           OPEN OUTPUT TRANS-FILE.
           OPEN OUTPUT BAD-FILE.

           MOVE ZEROES TO  REC-COUNT,
                           MOVE-COUNT,
                           DROP-COUNT,
                           WRITE-COUNT.

           START OLD-FILE KEY NOT < OLD-DATE-RECEIVED INVALID KEY
               DISPLAY "ERROR STARTING OLD FILE"
                                   LINE 24 POSITION 01 ERASE EOL
               GO TO 9001-CLOSE.

       1000-READ.
           ADD 1 TO REC-COUNT.
           DISPLAY "READING RECORD: "  LINE 12 POSITION 20.
           MOVE REC-COUNT TO NUMBER-DISPLAY.
           DISPLAY NUMBER-DISPLAY      LINE 12 POSITION 0.
           READ OLD-FILE NEXT RECORD AT END
               GO TO 1000-DONE.

       1000-MOVE.
           IF OLD-DATE-RECEIVED < PURGE-DATE
               GO TO 1000-READ.
           MOVE OLD-REC TO TRANS-REC.

       1000-WRITE.
           WRITE TRANS-REC INVALID KEY
               PERFORM 1000-BAD-REC THRU 1000-BAD-REC-EXIT
               GO TO 1000-READ.
           DISPLAY "RECORDS WRITTEN:"  LINE 18 POSITION 20.
           ADD 1 TO WRITE-COUNT.
           MOVE WRITE-COUNT TO NUMBER-DISPLAY.
           DISPLAY NUMBER-DISPLAY      LINE 18 POSITION 0.
           GO TO 1000-READ.

       1000-BAD-REC.
           MOVE REC-COUNT TO BAD-ID.
           MOVE OLD-REC TO BAD-DATA.
           DISPLAY "CAN NOT CORRECT DATA, WRITING  RECORD TO "
                                       LINE 24 POSITION 20 ERASE EOL.
           DISPLAY "TEMPORARY FILE NAMED 'BAD-FILE'."
                                       LINE 24 POSITION 0.

           WRITE BAD-REC INVALID KEY
               DISPLAY "RECORDS DROPPED:"  LINE 14 POSITION 20
               ADD 1 TO DROP-COUNT
               MOVE DROP-COUNT TO NUMBER-DISPLAY
               DISPLAY NUMBER-DISPLAY   LINE 14 POSITION 0
               GO TO 1000-BAD-REC-EXIT.

           DISPLAY "RECORDS MOVED:  "  LINE 16 POSITION 20.
           ADD 1 TO MOVE-COUNT.
           MOVE MOVE-COUNT TO NUMBER-DISPLAY.
           DISPLAY NUMBER-DISPLAY      LINE 16 POSITION 0.

       1000-BAD-REC-EXIT.
           EXIT.

       1000-DONE.
           DISPLAY "FINISHED"          LINE 22 POSITION 30 HIGH.

       9001-CLOSE.                                                           
           STOP RUN.                                                            
           END PROGRAM.

 

[A Nonny Moose 8,262]

Good grief, a console program!  I only wrote things like that for debugging something. 

The last big one I wrote was a corporate general ledger for a conglomerate that owned 3600 cost centres and kept a dual accrual ledger and a cash ledger.  It used a network database, and could be run either as a transaction processing system or batch, and could be updated using a time-sharing batch interface.  Nine separate COBOL overlays and a control program.  All in COBOL.

You would have laughed yourself silly.  There were something like 12 report writer areas, an audit system, and some other advanced stuff from the Journal of Development that had been implemented by our supplier.  The guy that was assigned to take it over from me gave it back because although he had 10 years COBOL experience it turned out to be the same year 10 times.  He couldn't follow the code when it called the first overlay to say nothing about not being able to find any write .. after advancing statement (there we none).

The external auditors whipped in a programmer who was going to audit this program, but he only knew IBM COBOL and this wasn't.  It was GE's implementation and they were very thorough, and had no IBM extensions like GO BACK.  If you wanted to terminate the job you had to use STOP RUN.  Poor kid never got past the Identification Division header.  The auditor was Price Waterhouse and you'd have thought they had some decent staff, but ... 

At the time the International Brotherhood of Magicians hadn't implemented the COBOL Report Writer, but GE had.  Saved a lot of messing about.  I had a programmable editor that did all the grunt work for me on the report writer, so I could whip one of those out in a few minutes.  I tried to get the editor to remember all the arcane syntax and if, of course, didn't make spelling mistakes.  A real professional programmer uses all the tools available rather than slugging through all the verbose coding.  Oh, and this compiler was caseless.  It didn't care what the input looked like because it upper cased the whole works on entry except for quoted literals.

[CorinaMarie 29,895]

8 hours ago, A Nonny Moose said:

... it turned out to be the same year 10 times.  ...

I loved all you wrote. At ^this I giggled with delight at your phaseology. :hug:

I am happy to at least recognize half of those languages you mentioned earlier. By that I mean I know of them. I've read like a million, no, maybe only a hundred. Ok 50ish, but it sure seemed like a lot, of books on programming. Like I have 5 separate ones on XP alone that I've read cover to cover and notated heavily. Dos 1.0 thru 6.22 like 10 - 15, 4 or so being on batch files, 3ish Assembler, one IRQ, DMA, I/O and one more verbose on IRQs. For my gaming needs, any gee-whiz-bang newer stuff would be superfluous. Oh, and I have like every volume of the Mueller fellow's book up to like 7th.

Side note. For those unfamiliar with a true IBM PC computer. Not the XT, mind you. The 5 slot one. Anyhow, they are Slow in comparison to the next generation and like hibernating snail speed compared to new comps. While I was testing my code with my copy of everything, and the original programmer's notes, flowcharts, etc, I was doing it on my 386. That part I posted is like a small fraction of it all.

Going sidetracked more. The printer guy's partner was the programmer. Got his training in one of the services. The one with the boats, iirc. And the printer guy kept it all after programmer guy left. (Died, perhaps.)

Now. For fun. Which version of cobol did I use? Hint, the RM in the RMCAL2 is the company's initials.

 

[A Nonny Moose 8,262]

We are way off topic, but this is a rather fun conversation. 

I have never written assembler for anything smaller than a s/370 and that was a class training exercise for my programming students.  Serious work that I have done was in the O/S for the GE Compatibles series (200, 400, 600) and the successor machine the Honeywell 9000 main frame.  We ( the support group ) often wrote specialization modules for the GCOS 8 operating system to replace the default job queueing system.  These modules had to be small, fast, and absolutely bullet proof because they were called as part of the job initiator to determine priority and queue for the job.  They had to fit in something less than 320 machine words (1280 9-bit bytes).  If you had a hiccup in this module you could bring the whole main frame down.  This kind of assembler work was often given to the O/S instructors including myself.  Testing was, of course, block time at 0300.  If you were lucky it was not on the weekend.  This is why real programmers don't eat quiche very often.  You can't get quiche out of a vending machine at 0300.

When I was working for the Toronto Data Centre at GE (I was assigned there from sales support) I wrote a phototypesetting system that was probably one of the first in North America.  It set a large corporate directory.  I think I was one of the few people who knew what kerning is and thin spaces too.  These days this kind of thing is done by simply formatting it in a word processor, but there were none in those days (late 1960s).  Interesting thing was that it was written in COBOL for the GE 400 Series.  Later on my future wife picked this package up and made it bilingual.  Set opposite pages in English and French with the exact same content on facing pages.  She was a lot better programmer than I ever was.

When the PC came out, I had a lot of fun with GW-BASIC.  In case you don't know, GW stands for Gee Whiz.  This version of BASIC lets you get at the hardware in privileged state.  The 1960s to 1980s were a lot of fun as far as programming was concerned.  After the announcement of the PC things kind of become rather ho-hum.  I think I can say categorically that it put paid to the story of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.  Only Snow White remains intact.  The others either died or become a lot smaller and specialized.  By then I had converted to UNIX and was working in C.  After Bjarne Soustrup got it going well, I also used C++.  Now, I am just a more than ordinary Linux user.

Oh, and when it comes to libraries and good references I hope every programmer has Don Knuth's Art of Computer Programming in several volumes.  The basics of the whole art is laid out there.

[wournos 53]

I bought the Deluxe version on Steam at sale in January. Roughly €2, which is far better than forking out the odd €40 on for example Amazon a year ago. I would only pay that kind of money for new games (new as in 1-2 years old). I don't buy brand new games anymore. I did that once. A big title game. It was riddled with bugs that required a massive patch 1 week after release. Never again, I say!

Anyway. I play on Mac so I haven't had any issues with the game from Steam - before or after delving into the mod scene.

[A Nonny Moose 8,262]

^ Interesting that you can purchase a version for MAC from Steam.  Which one did you get?  EA's or Aspyr's?

[CorinaMarie 29,895]

 

On 4/8/2016 at 7:07 PM, A Nonny Moose said:

We are way off topic, but this is a rather fun conversation.

I won't tattle on you.

 

On 4/8/2016 at 7:07 PM, A Nonny Moose said:

Oh, and when it comes to libraries and good references I hope every programmer has Don Knuth's Art of Computer Programming in several volumes.  The basics of the whole art is laid out there.

That doesn't sound familiar.

The only highly recommended book on programming I have is called something like: Code Complete.

[A Nonny Moose 8,262]

^ The Knuth books are expensive and incomplete to date.  Don started that project with the idea of publishing one volume a year, but the whole thing got sort of derailed by Moore's Conjecture.  He got too busy to keep up as well.  It is the best reference for people wanting to start with basic algorithms. 

The only other down on the iron and scratch book I can recommend is probably out of print.  It is "Computer Programming" by Ivan Flores.  This one postulates a non-existent machine and uses it to teach basic algorithms.

If you are interested in keeping up with the very latest C++ stuff I recommend Frank Brokken's C++ Annotations.  This is a reference work, not a text book.  It expects readers to know C cold.

[wournos 53]

21 hours ago, A Nonny Moose said:

^ Interesting that you can purchase a version for MAC from Steam.  Which one did you get?  EA's or Aspyr's?

Not sure what you mean. Both EA's and Aspyr's logos are shown when starting the game.

[CorinaMarie 29,895]

6 hours ago, A Nonny Moose said:

If you are interested in keeping up with the very latest C++ stuff I recommend Frank Brokken's C++ Annotations.  This is a reference work, not a text book.  It expects readers to know C cold.

Thanks for the tip!

But, no. While I do have an antique version of C/C++, my interests have diverged away from programming for the most part. I'll still toss together a Dos Batch File (script I guess it is in higher windoze versions) if I want to organize / move massive numbers of files or a Clarion program if I need to sort and analyze data.

[A Nonny Moose 8,262]

2 hours ago, wournos said:

Not sure what you mean. Both EA's and Aspyr's logos are shown when starting the game.

Aspyr got permission from EA and a copy of the source to port the game to MAC O/S.  There are some slight differences and some of the Maxis fixes don't seem to have made it to the Asypr version.  If you have Asypr's logo, you have their version.  Do you get lights on custom content when running at night?  I am not sure the 640 patch made it to the Aspyr version.

You can run the Windows (EA) version using various strategies on MAC O/S.  Have you ever tried wineskin?  It appears to be the MAC version of wine which runs Windows executables on Linux, and rather well.

[wournos 53]

^Yes I have lights during night.

[A Nonny Moose 8,262]

Maxis buildings have always had lights at night.  Please confirm you get night lights on custom buildings in your Plugins.  It means that the 640 patch material was included in the Aspyr version if this is so.  Originally the textures for this were omitted from the BAT.