38 lines
1.7 KiB
Plaintext
38 lines
1.7 KiB
Plaintext
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Literary criticism meets COBOL
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A team of American scholars have performed a detailed computer
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analysis and they confirm that the language COBOL was invented
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by William Shakespeare (and not by Bacon, Elizabeth I, Walter
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Raleigh, Marlowe, Ben Johnson, or Don Knuth.) Taking a large
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sample of known COBOL programs, and works by the above authors,
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they performed a detailed analysis and confirm that COBOL
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matched the Shakespearean style almost perfectly. It also
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enabled them to identify various other works as COBOL programs
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which were previously thought to be poetry. For example the
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following is now known to be a genuine COBOL program.
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"Let us ADD our INCOME to our CAPITAL, as the squirrel adds to
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its autumn horde. Aye, there's the SUM that makes a TOTAL
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WEALTH. 3000 DUCATS? Is this an EXPENDITURE I see before me?
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Marry 'tis best 'twere TAKEN AWAY, like as the magpie taketh
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away the jewel of great price. But hist! Here cometh the
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INTEREST, and 'tis of no mean interest, i' faith! I had lief ADD
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a percentage of this, than clasp my fair Rosalind's spleen."
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Scholars have occasionally suspected that COBOL programs are
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supposed to have a 'hidden agenda', rather than being straight
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works of art in themselves. One bizarre theory is that they may
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contain numerical calculations embedded in them -- indeed some
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scholars claimed that a Baconian cipher was involved. This seems
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implausible however.
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Analysis of FORTRAN programs is next on the list -- can 'Into
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the Valley of Death GOTO 600' really be by Alfred Lord Tennyson,
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or is just a pastiche of his style? Nobody knows for sure.
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On the other hand, scholars are fairly sure than the C language
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was devised by James Joyce -- mainly because, like Joyce, most
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of it is totally unreadable.
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