I haven't written in COBOL since some time in the 1980s. That's not counting a short ciphering routine I wrote coming up on Y2K, and a lot of ~reading~ COBOL programs for a client in 2012. But I keep hearing that COBOL is keeping up with the times, and I'm sort of curious. What's been added? It already had most of the capability that I can imagine it needing.
(In my day the fanciest COBOL statements I can think of were STRING and UNSTRING. At least one employer at the time didn't allow us to use them, on the grounds that they were seldom used and a novice COBOL coder might not be familiar with them. My own position on that - and a later boss agreed - is that STRING and UNSTRING are COBOL, do you hear there?, and if a novice COBOL coder isn't familiar with them then that's ok and his job is to ~get~ familiar with them.) --- Bob Bridges, robhbrid...@gmail.com, cell 336 382-7313 /* Your man...doesn't think of doctrines as primarily "true" or "false", but as "academic" or "practical", "outworn" or "contemporary"....Don't waste time trying to make him think that materialism is ~true~! Make him think it is strong or stark or courageous -- that it is the philosophy of the future. -advice to a tempter from _The Screwtape Letters_ by C S Lewis */ -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List <IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU> On Behalf Of Gibney, Dave Sent: Monday, February 6, 2023 16:30 ....Digressing from my statement that COBOL was not hard to learn. And as has been also stated, modern Cobol is capable of many things that used to be tricky to do, but were possible even then. (1980s) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
