# Materials

Here a collection of excerpts that could be useful at some point.

## Documentation, from Early History of COBOL

Dumentation was handled fairly informally, in the sense that there were no requirements in the early development for what could or should be documented. In particular, there was no record kept of the reasons behind certain decisions, except insofar as individuals might have these in their hand notes.

At the September 17, 1959, meeting there was a considerable discussion as to what the first public description should have as its objective.
Even at that time there was a considerable discussion of the difference between the language manual issued in the name of CODASYL and the individual manuals that would be
issued by each manufacturer.

(The Early History of COBOL, Jean E. Sammet)

## Intended Purpose & Users, from Early History of COBOL

It was certainly intended (and expected) that the language could be used by novice programmers and read by the management. We felt the readability by management could and would be achieved because of the intended use of English, which was a fundamental conclusion from the May 1959 Pentagon meeting.

Surprisingly, although we wanted the language to be easy to use, particularly for nonprofessional programmers, we did not really give much thought to ensuring that the language Would be easy to learn; most of our concentration was on making it "easy to read" although we never provided any criteria or tests for readability.

COBOL was intended for use only in the United States, even though experience from Grace Hopper's group had shown that the transliteration into another natural language at this level was trivial. I believe that subsequently other countries (e.g., Germany, Japan, Netherlands, and Sweden - but not France) have used COBOL with English key words but their own data names.

What this does to their readability is left to the imagination!

## Pressure for COBOL everywhere from the Dep of Def

do you think
C O B O L would have survived without the pressure applied by the Department o f Defense
in requiring C O B O L on all m a c h i n e s ?

hylarius copypaste from OCR pdf

## comments in COBOL

MARCOTTY: F r o m Paul Abrahams: " W h a t thought was given to c o m m e n t s in C O B O L ?
Why a r e n ' t they allowed in the Data Division?"
SAMMET: We didn't think they were needed in the Data Division.

## Math operators in COBOL

Did the COBOL committee seriously believe that the users could not handle grade
school operators of `+`, `-` , `x`, `/`?

## Annette Vee argues for literacy contingencies in her coding literacy

Importantly, Vee indicates that her aim is not to establish what coding literacy should look like; on the contrary, her premise is precisely that ‘prescriptions for literacy are always contingent’ (10) because literacies are always contingent. The framework of literacy helps her mobilize the extensive knowledge embedded in the study of literacy in order to provide a socially and historically informed perspective on coding as a literacy practice.

Federica Frabetti. “Review of Annette Vee, Coding Literacy.” Computational Culture 8 (July 2021). http://computationalculture.net/review-of-annette-vee-coding-literacy/.