Tony H wrote | Now back to our regular COBOL, uh, programming.
thus alluding to how many of us view of the language. Over a now long career I never took COBOL seriously. I was aware of it, and I even learned to write it by helping COBOL programmers with their problems. It is a verbose but finally very simple language. That said, I could not, and did not, think much of a language without real storage management, strings, pointers, booleans, etc., etc. It was move-oriented, compile-time bound, and synchronous, and I find these characteristics despicable. Recently, however, it has been greatly improved, making, for example, usable pointers and LIFO, local, i.e., 'automatic', storage available. It is now often possible to write something the way one wishes to write it in COBOL. These new facilities are not yet much used. Some shops indeed interdict their use as 'unnecessary'. Their availability does nonetheless make it possible to update a COBOL application using appropriate, adult technology; and this is important because many COBOL applications are so large that jettisoning them is, at least in the short term, economically impractical. Able but naif people often radically underestimate the resources and time that will be required to convert a COBOL application to, say, C/C++; and in the upshot they fail in their attempts to do so. I know of shops in which there have been four (sic) such failed attempts. New CIOs often launch a new one, the smartest of them going on to greener pastures before its failure too becomes obvious. It is, however, possible to refurbish and extend COBOL systems in COBOL. The trick in doing so is to use able programmers trained in a different tradition whom you bribe to learn COBOL, avoiding [most] experienced COBOL programmers as plague carriers or, better, using the best of them only as consultants about how an application currently works. John Gilmore, Ashland, MA 01721 - USA ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
