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  • RIP Jean Sammet, mother of COBOL, ACM past president

    Posted on June 5, 2017 at 19:48 CDT by • Comment in the Forums

    I’m saddened to report that Jean Sammet – one of the true pioneers of our industry – passed away on May 20, at the age of 89.

    Full obituary in the New York Times.

    I remember being entranced by “Programming Languages: History and Fundamentals” — and suffering months of painful debugging in COBOL, in one of my first real jobs.

    As an academic FORTRAN jockey and Pascal instructor, COBOL, to me, always felt a bit plebian. But it sure got the job done.

    000100 IDENTIFICATION DIVISION.
000200 PROGRAM-ID.     HELLOWORLD.
000300
000400*
000500 ENVIRONMENT DIVISION.
000600 CONFIGURATION SECTION.
000700 SOURCE-COMPUTER. RM-COBOL.
000800 OBJECT-COMPUTER. RM-COBOL.
000900
001000 DATA DIVISION.
001100 FILE SECTION.
001200
100000 PROCEDURE DIVISION.
100100
100200 MAIN-LOGIC SECTION.
100300 BEGIN.
100400     DISPLAY " " LINE 1 POSITION 1 ERASE EOS.
100500     DISPLAY "Hello world!" LINE 15 POSITION 10.
100600     STOP RUN.
100700 MAIN-LOGIC-EXIT.
100800     EXIT.
    Other
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