I think the review of Personal Cobol (issue 47) fell below the standards you usually maintain as it seemed to be used as an opportunity for David Guest to air his dislike of Cobol.

I share his dislike of the language, but would not choose a product review to make this dislike known.

Cobol is aimed at the commercial programmer. It is long established so a huge amount of business software is written in it. If you aspire to contract programming in the big wide world, fluency in Cobol will assure employment.

The review suggests there is something wrong with planning your assault on the keyboard. It suggests planning things with pencil, paper and forethought is doomed to failure. Well, I disagree. It always works. There is nothing macho about sitting at a keyboard with a blank screen, blank mind and banging away when the inspiration hits. It results in a tatty program which may give you a sense of achievement when it finally does what you want it do, but makes anyone else who had to look at the source go 'bleah'.

I would also take issue with the use of the phrase '...mysterious things called RPG II or APL'. I'm not being pedantic, but why not leave out the witty asides and instead have a column somewhere saying what APL is and more importantly why people use it. And the same with other languages.

I know half the population will never see APL or RPG II or Speakeasy (wot dat, you say) but that should not stop you telling them about it. After all, you have just spent two pages telling people not to buy an extremely good package - which fulfils its design role admirably! - on the grounds that you cannot sit at the terminal and hack away with it.

Do people realise some languages are a pain to use but always give good results because they will not work unless you tell them exactly what each variable is before hand? Not like hacking, where you suddenly decide at line 2270 that you could do with an AAZG to get you through the next loop.

Paul Hardy, Bingley, West Yorks

Bound in Band-Aid after the wounds of this two-pronged attack, David Guest replies that he's waving the banner of 'fair comment' to Mr. Fryer's letter, but is rather less polite to Mr. Hardy. When, he asks, did we ever suggest not buying Personal Cobol? - Ed