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1 Comment to 'why in your opinion, did COBOL allow long identifiers when Fortran and ALGOL did not?'
November 28, 2009
COBOL is more of a reporting language than Fortran. Since Fortran handles calculations much better, there is not a real need for long identifiers. As a reporting language, COBOL uses long identifiers in tagging the source to the reports it is writing. Also, COBOL is the closest language to a fully, self documenting language, that it gets, and long identifiers provides one more case for it.
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