Thus it was written in the epistle of Nick Demos,
> Steve Dirickson wrote:
> >
> > > OK and know for the 64 Dollar question  ..  What is the correct
> > > capitalization of cobol and why?
> >
> Not true, Steve.  It used to be (who knows what is correct now?) that only
> the initial letters of the words in the name were capitalized.  Ergo, CoBOL
> stands for Common Business Oriented language and the "o" is not capitalized.
> ForTran stands for Formula Translator, therefor ForTran.  Of course this is
> historical and you may see it all caps or only the first letter capitalized.

That's funny, I would've voted for CoBoL for Common Business-oriented Language.
Goes to show what little I know :-).

> P. S Also RPG, Pascal, Java, SPL PL1, APL and if I know what Perl
>      stands for.

To quote from the preface to the Camel (p. xi), "To those who merely like it,
Perl is the _Practical_Extraction_and_Report_Language_.  To those who love it,
Perl is the _Pathologically_Eclectic_Rubbish_Lister_.  And to the minimalists
in the crowd, Perl seems like a pointless exercise in redundancy.  But that's
okay.  The world needs a few reductionists (maily as physicists).
Reductionists like to take things apart.  The rest of us are just trying to
get it together."

Ted
--
Ted Ashton ([log in to unmask]), Info Serv, Southern Adventist University
          ==========================================================
It is clear that Economics, if it is to be a science at all, must be a
mathematical science.
                        -- Jevons, William Stanley