In article <[log in to unmask]>,
Sletten Kenneth W <[log in to unmask]> writes
>Glenn maintains:
>
>> ....  but I have found that none of these can come close to
>> matching COBOL for power and flexibility to do the "non-
>> standard" stuff.
>
>Obviously Glenn has never done any programming using
>Transact/iX:  You can do anything you can do in COBOL;
>in many if not most cases with only 10-40 percent the lines
>of code that the equivalent COBOL program would have....
>
MOVE CORR  ?
88 LEVELS  ?
INSPECT    ?
SEARCH ALL ?

You can probably cobble together some code which will achieve the effect
of any given INSPECT, and degrade SEARCH ALL (binary chop) to a SEARCH
(linear) equivalent.

88 LEVELS (Condition Names) you can handle with Booleans and a lot more
code.

But MOVE CORR? This intelligent and elegant data-structure to data-
structure mapping, invaluable when moving screen-data to and from
records, and when moving records to other records, seems to have eluded
every other language.

Despite the ludicrous tangles you can get in with pointers, and the
painful restrictions on what you can and can't supply to functions, the
absence of something like MOVE CORR is actually my biggest
disappointment with C.

OTOH, fair do's; I wish COBOL had malloc(). Coming, though, I hear.


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