What do you mean, "You can't run COBOL on Windows!"?
And a ping to ShadowAce for the Tech list...
Posted on 09/17/2019 2:54:12 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
COBOL is celebrating 60 years since its specifications were signed off. Darling of Y2K consultants, the language is rapidly approaching pensionable age, but many a greybeard owes their career to it.
It arose from a desire to create a language that could straddle the computers of the era. Each manufacturer had its own way of working, which, while OK if a company always stuck with one maker, made portability of programs or skills a tad tricky.
If only there was, say, a COmmon Business-Oriented Language? Wouldn't that be splendid?
Mary Hawes, a programmer of Burroughs machines, put forward a proposal in 1959 that users and manufacturers create a common language that could run on different computers and handle tasks such as payroll calculation and record keeping. The US Department of Defense (DoD), which tended to buy computers from different makers, took an interest and sponsored a meeting in May of that year to kick off the creation of the language.
Having found the then two-year-old FORTRAN not quite to its taste, the DoD was keen on an alternative and the target date of September was set for a specification for an interim language, a stopgap that would become COBOL.
(Excerpt) Read more at theregister.co.uk ...
The custom stuff comes down to OS-related calls and understanding how DASD is used.
It’s pretty easy to program, outside of the OS/DASD custom stuff.
What do you mean, "You can't run COBOL on Windows!"?
And a ping to ShadowAce for the Tech list...
No COBOL, but way too much RPG II in a previous life.
Compiles Only Because Of Luck
COBOL is plug ugly! Got the PICTURE?
COBOL is not hard. It’s a very straightforward language, but it’s not what you’d be doing if you picked up Cobol today. Coding in any large software system that has forty or more years of patches, workarounds, acquisitions and reorganizations baked into it and doing it in COBOL which was never designed to handle all of the data, object, policy and security realities of today — without breaking a system that is so critical to the business that it hasn’t replatformed once in all this time — is what you’ll be paid to do. It’s good money, but it’s far from easy money for someone to break in to.
Imagine my surprise when in 2000 they wanted to assign me to a project to program in COBOL!!!!
I said, I'm a bit rusty and don't think that's my best match......
“Only two kinds of people worry about missing periods. Teenage girls and COBOL programmers.”
L
Cobol, Fortran, Assembler, RPG and a bunch of report writers. Assembler was the sh*t.
“IDENTIFICATION DIVISION.” - Sounds like a sub-section of the FBI or something.
Fortran. ...had to learn it for my structural engineering classes. Never used it one time since college days. :’ -(
FORTRAN, my very first college programming class. Afterwards I went on to use EasyTrieve which is basically COBOL without a compiler, NOMAD, some Assembler, and DB2.
I Enjoy Data Processing (actually I don’t, but the phrase is burned in from the one time I strayed from technical languages)
I took a COBOL course in college and found that it was good for producing reports and such, but I don’t think I’d want to use it much beyond that.
SOAP II, Autocoder, GMAP, Cobol, More Assembler, SDL (the best) and C++. Went to work for Burroughs in ‘68. Put 38 years in. Can’t remember the language for Unisys large systems in Orange County. Lousy memory.; <((
If you don't understand the assembly language for the machine you're coding for, you're not a real programmer. If I had a choice all my (DSP) code would be in assembler, but most managers who've never written a program themselves are afraid of it.
ML/NJ
C pretty much killed Assembler.
My only acquaintance with COBOL is a college course I took just to see how good the coding language compares with FORTRAN which is what I used to write over a million lines of code in engineering and manufacturing procedures.
Later on I came across dBASE coding language and found it was far more useful compared to the previous 2 languages. The main reason was it allows direct and quick manipulation of data stored in files without needing to code anything. If only dBASE was available during the 1960’s & 1970’s, my job would have been 10 times more productive.
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