just wondering (someone I met)

[Ninjakreborn]

I am not thinking about these or anything, but I wanted to ask.

I had a guy when I was traveling on a bus yesterday.  He was around 63.  You know how some people are, they sometimes start talking to random people, I started up a conversation with him.  after talking about 1 hour, I found out a lot.  He was in hte army, new all these fighting styles, made medicine that he said could cure a  lot.  I am not gullible so obviously I didn't trust all that he said, I knew he was in the army, but most everything else was probably fabricated, probably just lying to get attention, or feel better about himself.

However we then got on a discussion about programming
He told me that he had been doing programming for over 53 years.  I was wondering, if he was telling the truth, I don't think it was quite that long, but he knew quite a bit about what he was talking about.  He sounded dumb when I brought up PHP, or newer languages, so I asked him what he did.

He mentioned cobal, fortran, some perl.

He said that he did those for along time.  It had seemed he lied about there use, and I wanted to make sure, this is what he said for each

Fortran - A medicinal related programming langauge.  Made and used for programming medical machinery, creating medicines, and other like tasks.

Cobal - A military related programming languages, that deals with high level military stuff, creating military communications, military structures (with computers), and pretty much everything military related. 

Then he said he did genetic engineering on high level medicines, that's when I started not believing him about that.

I was wondering if the things he mentioned about these 2 programming langauges were realistic, is that what they are used for, is that there only purposes, or are they just other languages used to do desktop applications, because I NEVER hear really of anyone doing cobal or fortran, I never heard of that before him, except the name from time to time, but never looked into it.

[obsidian]

Do a little research on the languages themselves, and you'll see that the overview of what he's saying is pretty accurate, although any language can be applied to any setting, not strictly military, business, etc. Read up on the history of the languages yourself:

[url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COBOL]History of COBOL[/url]
[url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FORTRAN]History of FORTRAN[/url]

While the comments you've cited are an oversimplification, they are both very valid applications of the languages.

[Ninjakreborn]

Oh ok.  So he was telling the truth about some of it, thanks.

Also thanks for the links.