Comment by notfried

24 days ago

> Well, there are quite a lot of rumors and stigma surrounding COBOL. This intrigued me to find out more about this language, which is best done with some sort of project, in my opinion. You heard right - I had no prior COBOL experience going into this.

I hope they'd write an article about any insights they gained. Like them, I hear of these rumors and stigma, and would be intrigued to learn what a new person to COBOL encountered while implementing this rather complex first project.

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notfried

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082349872349872  24 days ago

One of the rumoured stigma is that the object-oriented flavour of COBOL goes by the unwieldy name of ADD ONE TO COBOL YIELDING COBOL.

At least it doesn't have the unrumoured stigma of older FORTRANs, which ignored whitespace, allowing:

    DO 10 I=1.10

to silently compile an assignment:

    DO10I = 1.10

instead of signalling an error for the syntax of the loop the flight software programmer had intended:

    DO 10 I=1,10

  • skissane  23 days ago

    > One of the rumoured stigma is that the object-oriented flavour of COBOL goes by the unwieldy name of ADD ONE TO COBOL YIELDING COBOL.

    Which is a joke. Rather than an extension, the COBOL standard itself incorporates OO support, since COBOL 2002. The COBOL standards committee began work on the object-oriented features in the early 1990s, and by the mid-1990s some vendors (Micro Focus, Fujitsu, IBM) were already shipping OO support based on drafts of the COBOL 2002 standard. Unfortunately, one problem with all the COBOL standards since COBOL 85 (2002, 2014 and 2023), is no vendor ever fully implements them. In part that is due to lack of market demand, in part it is because NIST stopped funding its freely available test suite after COBOL 85, which removed a lot of the pressure on vendors to conform to the standard.