[Tobias is a senior high school ("Gymnasium" in German) student from North Friesland in Germany. He maintains his own webpage on www.tobiassnissen.de, with an UniCOMAL section, and has been good enough to upload an account of his experience with COMAL. Here is an English translation of the orginal German article, which we have placed in our "Deutsche Zusammenfassung" section. - Ed.]
I first came into contact with COMAL at home when I was about 11 years old. My father had a version of COMAL that he needed for his (my) school on his 286. So I familiarised myself with the language to some extent, copied bits and pieces from other programmes that were on hard drive already and attempted some programming of my own. The result was a crazily long English-German translation programme that lacked any kind of programming style. Instead of collating the words in a database, I linked each one to an IF structure - so each word took three lines. I often spent entire afternoons on the computer, armed with a dictionary, just to type in vocabulary. Later COMAL crossed my path again - in a computing workshop at my school. We were building little robots with the help of Lego Technik and COMAL (for the C64) - it was a piece of cake! From this day on, my interest in COMAL became even stronger.
Later still, when a proper computing course had been set up, we used COMAL again, the PC version this time. A few schoolmates and I secretly made some copies (we already had COMAL at home but the school version was much newer) so that we could continue programming at home. From then on, smaller and larger (programming) tasks were solved with COMAL. Then our computing course changed to Perl as we wanted to familiarise ourselves with CGI. COMAL was not really suitable for this.
Meantime, however, it looks as if our course were to change back to COMAL as we approach a new topic: computer assisted use of measuring devices. To enter data, we use the joystick port, and since nobody knew off hand how to do this in Perl, COMAL came to the fore once more.
During all this time, I used to write larger or smaller programmes in COMAL. I am not exaggerating in saying that it must have been almost 500. Admittedly, I only started most of them, and they were full of errors or not even 100% functional, yet each one is a programme in its own right. But what is the really fascinating thing about COMAL? I think it's its simplicity combined with the amount of commands and its graphics potential. For example, you can learn the language extremely fast. In the learning process, you access the online help a few times, you understand - and you go on writing. There isn't even any complicated syntax that you have to grasp first of all. Everything is a clear and logical build-up. So the language is easy to learn and, in addition, offers good possibilities for a long time afterwards to improve your programming skills. The changeover to another (procedures oriented) programming language comes very easy. Although I use Perl nowadays, I still resort to COMAL from time to time when I want to program a graphic application.
I would not like to get rid of COMAL so fast just yet.
Posted 03-August-2001