Subj : Re: curve for verbosity in a language
To   : comp.programming
From : Rob Thorpe
Date : Tue Aug 02 2005 12:17 pm

Jon Harrop wrote:
> Jeff Lanam wrote:
> > COBOL appears at first to be verbose; there's a fair amount of
> > required syntax, and the conventions adopted over the years discourage
> > dense packing of language elements in the program.  However, if you
> > look at the power of statements like INSPECT, STRING, or UNSTRING, or
> > the kinds of data transformation implicit in the MOVE statement,
> > you'll see operations that would take many lines of code in other
> > languages.
>
> Would you be so kind as to explain what these things do, so we can have a go
> at translating them?

They are string matching operations.

STRING concatenates strings together
UNSTRING splits strings up by delimiters, it has many options to
control it's behaviour.
INSPECT performs two operations on the contents on a string: counting
characters or replacing them.

All of these things can be done fairly easily in other languages if you
write a few functions to do them.

They may shorten short programs vis a vis other languages.  But long
programs in other languages tend to contain equivalents to them, so
there is less difference.  Plus many other things are difficult in
COBOL.

.