Right you are, Robin. Moore thought of his threaded interpretive language (TIL) as a fourth generation programming language. Do you know why he spelled it FORTH instead of FOURTH?

Designing good data structures is the key to any successful program but the agonizing expression of those structures in COBOL has more to do with accountants, managers and legacy unit record equipment than it does computing. I've been trying to find the source for a quote I always liked from a very well known computer scientist. It went something like:

COBOL was designed so that it could be read by non-programmers. Nobody could seriously have believed this; no one reads programs, not even programmers read programs.

I don't have time to wade through my library trying to find the source. Maybe it will come to me.

      - Mark