> Theoretically, COBOL was intended to be self documenting. The
> choice of
> reserved words and the variable naming convention were
> intended to make
> comments unnecessary (not to imply that it worked).

It did work, but only at the level it was intended to work for:
individual statements and expressions. But understanding a single
statement is only a small problem: understanding what a whole section
does is more difficult, and understanding why it does that is even
harder. A program can only approach being self-documenting when the
language has abstractions for the higher levels, and allows these levels
to be named appropriately.

Wouter van Ooijen

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Van Ooijen Technische Informatica: www.voti.nl
consultancy, development, PICmicro products

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