My last exposure to COBOL involved its use as a generated language, in a "4GL" called LINC that came out of Burroughs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LINC_4GL LINC was a (dreadful) front-end language that generated COBOL and database code, which were then compiled into executable systems. When a system written in LINC was being ported from a Burroughs mainframe to a Sequent UNIX system, and the database changing from EBCDIC heirarchical DMSII to ASCII (different collating sequence) relational Oracle, one of the things I did was to write a C program that rewrote the COBOL between systems to properly transmogrify the data and functionality. Blech. Just to point out that things like COBOL show up in strange places, often causing them to far outlive their natural lifespan. On Mon, 22 May 2017 10:54:10 -0400 william degnan via vcf-midatlantic <vcf-midatlantic@lists.vintagecomputerfederation.org> wrote:
I have since learned more about how Cobol is used today on IBM mainframes. Cobol is still used as a backbone data processing language at lot more than I knew of. There is a huge amount of data going through Cobol I/O processing. When I think Cobol I ask, isn't there something a column-less data processing platform like Hadoop cannot do equally as well? I guess that'd all be off topic, but it may simply be that it'd be too much trouble to replace something that works with something that *might*. Rather than say it's obsolete I change my characterization of Cobol to "nothing better enough" has come along to warrant replacement of the Cobol already installed. It's not obsolete as long as it's too much trouble to maintain. There is still work for Cobol. People are probably initiating fewer *new* Cobol projects than say Python, to do more or less the same thing. Or Big Data Hadoop. Those people probably find Cobol an obsolete solution.
Bill
On Mon, May 22, 2017 at 10:19 AM, Drew Notarnicola via vcf-midatlantic < vcf-midatlantic@lists.vintagecomputerfederation.org> wrote:
If it's not technically obsolete, would you still say it probably /shouldn't/ be used?
On Thu, May 18, 2017 at 5:55 AM, Brian Schenkenberger via vcf-midatlantic < vcf-midatlantic@lists.vintagecomputerfederation.org> wrote:
Dave McGuire via vcf-midatlantic writes:
On 05/17/2017 07:33 PM, william degnan via vcf-midatlantic wrote: > ..I used cobol when I worked at dupont tso/JCL (Damn autocorrect) > > Cobol is obsolete though. My professional opinion
Your bank statement would disagree with you.
Cobol is *out of fashion*. Obsolete doesn't mean quite the same thing.
I still have customers actively developing their application with COBOL. With extensions in the compiler, they make extensive use of VMS RMS ISAM files. I stil can't make head-or-tails of those damn PIC statements.