On 16 Feb 2013 13:15:06 -0800, in bit.listserv.ibm-main you wrote:

>On Sat, Feb 16, 2013 at 3:26 PM, Scott Ford <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>> Thomas,
>>
>> I don't follow, writing in several languages , what awkward to do in
>> cobol, supervisory stuff yes for sure.
>>
>
>Yoda? Is that you? :-)
>
>If this was supposed to be asking "What is it that's awkward to do in
>COBOL?", try calculating the offset between two data elements. For one. I
>know that every time I go to write something in it, I run up against "You
>just can't do that in this language" and my response is "Seriously? Wow."
>(OK, or I write an assembler function to enable what I need...)

Read the current manuals.  As someone who has manipulated the SMF 30
records using COBOL WITHOUT resorting to Assembler, I can state that
for much problem program state work, COBOL is quite adequate.  I have
also created a system usage report in COBOL that read files of IDR
records created by an assembler program and parsed source program
files to determine CALL and COPY usage.  Enterprise COBOL is a very
powerful language and adding the 2002 improvements would make it even
more so.

Clark Morris
>
>Admittedly, COBOL isn't as bad as I'd been led to believe by three decades
>of avoiding it -- but as the saying goes, "You can write your program in
><pick a language>, or you can write a story about your program in COBOL".

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