Re: A Plain English Compiler

> John said (back in 2006) "You can certainly chop English down to
> a small unambiguous subset, but then you've just reinvented Cobol"
>
> As someone who has had to work with COBOL somewhat, it is interesting
> to compare the two languages:


Thanks for that detail! The discussion in 2006 seemed too dismissive of
this idea, and I worried that this go-around would subside similarly.
Comparing all attempts at english-like pidgins to cobol seems like a cheap
and overly broad shot. Hopefully now we can have a more substantive
discussion.


I unpacked the zipfile in the original kickstarter link (
http://www.osmosian.com/cal-3040.zip) and found the thousands of lines of
punctuation-free code startlingly alien yet attractive (see attached
screenshot). I had a similar reaction to the 100+ page manual written in
comic sans (http://www.osmosian.com/instructions.pdf). This isn't cobol at
all, and it's worth engaging with on its own terms.


I wish I could play with building the sources without resorting to an
untrusted .exe on a windows machine. How was the executable generated? Does
each new version bootstrap using the previous one?


Kartik
http://akkartik.name/about
[COBOL has an undeserved poor reputation largely among people who've
never used it. Yes, it's wordy, deliberately so, and its faciilities
for control structure are weak by modern standards, but it invented
the structured data we now take for granted in languages like C and
C++ and has a wider range of datatypes than most of its successors.
For its time and its intended application it was a huge success.
-John]

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