where have all the keypunch operators gone, long time passing

[Don Shepherd]

to paraphrase an old Peter, Paul, and Mary song.

I recently acquired an old keypunch operator training book from 1970. Here is a paragraph from the book:

"It is important that all punctuation marks such as hyphens and commas be punched exactly as written by the programmer. Sometimes well-meaning keypunch operators with a good understanding of the English language change the punctuation marks to make the COBOL statement grammatically correct; this can be disastrous."

Indeed!

I haven't programmed for a living in several decades now, but I wonder if current programming languages are more forgiving of errors than old languages like FORTRAN and COBOL.