I can't tell if you're being funny or deserve to be beaten with a stick.

"Good enough" is usually good enough, especially for consumer goods that won't be around that long anyway.

The power was out for 5 days after Isaac, and we got used to the heat., as our great grandparents did before A/C.

A gas stove really helped, though, since even then cold meals get old.

More like this, to put over a 5 gal bucket.

So they were lying when they said they were "stretched in most areas of the country"?

My cousin, when a newly-minted psychiatrist, worked for NZ on a 6 month contract and so has intimate, first-hand knowledge of NZ's health care problems: every sector has shortages.

Doctors and nurses don't want to permanently work there because the salaries are so low. Thus, they need to spend more money on foreign contract workers.

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10575739&pnum=0

How long will you have to wait to get it? Canada, NZ & UK have pretty long waiting lists for expensive procedures (don't know about other countries), and people regularly die waiting for them.

I live in New Orleans, too, but the part that doesn't flood.

We still left for Katrina, but were back in 6 weeks, after the power and cable (I telecommute) were pretty reliable.

In July we'll stock up on:

• canned food,
• powdered milk,
• bottled water,
• paper diningware/plastic utensils,
• bleach,
• cat litter,
• gasoline,
• a camp toilet.

Which is why I wrote, Actually, though, those are procedures.

Most people aren't as open-minded as you...

One correction, though: mainframes *are* back ends. And COBOL is a very portable language. As long as you aren't calling CICS or IMS, mainframe code should run perfectly fine on Linux.

While COBOL doesn't have functions that reside in the same file as the code you're currently writing, it certainly does (since at least COBOL-74) have CALL. Actually, though, those are procedures.

A lazy programmer is a lazy programmer no matter what language he uses.

No doubt that COBOL can easily be made very painful.

Maybe I was just fortunate to hook up with grey-beards who *grokked* the language far more than our textbook and teacher ever did, and showed me language features and coding techniques that made the programs quite structured.

In 1984 it was:
1) Comp Sci snobbery.
2) Horrible textbooks.

The painful contortions that Shelly & Cashman twisted COBOL-74 into so as to be GOTO-less meant that no one liked the language.

It was only when I got a Real Job in the Real World that I appreciated the power of COBOL.

You haven't actually written production COBOL, have you?

Not that your typical business report program has any use for those things.

Exactly. COBOL and FORTRAN were targeted domain-specific languages before the term was invented, and the targets weren't Edsger Dykstra.

COBOL is a great language for it's specific domain. There's a special Hell waiting for PHBs who mandate C/C++ and Java for record-oriented business applications.