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  • Re: What Is Unix? (was: H

    From Timex@VERT/VINTAGE to Mortar on Tuesday, November 10, 2026 20:04:00
    Mortar wrote to MIKE POWELL <=-

    IBM 370/158; COBOL 74 was the dialect. Yeah, you had to watch that
    Data Division, but the Procedure Div. could be even more treacherous.
    One mis-placed special character can generate a multitude of error
    msgs. In fact we used to hold contests (unofficially, of course) on
    who could generate the most. I never came close to the record, which I believe was over 200 errors, just because a comma was used instead of a period, I forget how.

    When I was in high school, i had a class learning WATBOL. I and one other were really good at it, so we were tapped to help the teacher with debugging code written by other classmates. One person had 350+ Warnings and Errors, which made me laugh *hard*. I circled the first three typos I saw with my Red Pen(tm)
    and told them to fix and recompile. That took care of almost all of the issues.


    ... If at first you don't succeed, skydiving is not for you.
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