Hi! Can you share the slides or the recording when you can? It's a bit too late for an old lady like me to watch it online at midnight 🤦♀️ I really really want to know about this. Cheers, Tara
On 5 November 2025 16:29:10 UTC, George Rosamond <[email protected]> wrote: >RSVP ASAP to rsvp AT lists.nycbug.org to gain access to the meeting >location. > >**** > >The Once and Future COBOL, James Lowden >2025-11-05 @ 18:45 local (23:45 UTC) - NYU Tandon Engineering Building >(new), 370 Jay St, 7th Floor kitchen area, Brooklyn > >GCC 15, released in April 2025, for the first time includes COBOL among >the languages it compiles. Alongside the venerable gcc and g++, there is >now gcobol. > >The reader may well wonder why a small company would devote years of >development to produce a product they don't own and can't sell. Why did >GCC decide to include COBOL? In short, what use is COBOL? > >To those questions and more, we have answers. > >As Mark Twain said of himself, news of COBOL's demise is much >exaggerated. Industry studies show billions of lines of COBOL still in >production. With a probability of 95%, your last ATM transaction went >through a COBOL application. Not for nothing did nearly every large firm >pull out the stops 25 years ago for Y2K to adapt their critical software >to the 21st century. They didn't do that to throw it all away. > >COBOL was and remains useful because it was specifically designed for >its problem domain. No language is better suited for nuts-and-bolts >unglamorous data processing. For example, COBOL defines an I/O model, >numerical precision, 8 forms of rounding, and over 100 runtime exceptions. > >Programming languages often have shallow, undeserved reputations. Lisp >has too many parentheses, COBOL too many words, Perl is write-only. >Let's talk about why COBOL remains viable and vital, and why it's now >part of GCC. > >James lives in Maine, where he tries to work 11 months a year, reserving >August for sailing with his wife and their dog. He worked for many years >on Wall Street on quantitative research systems. For a decade he was the >maintainer for FreeTDS (www.freetds.org), a client library for SQL >Server. Due in part to his efforts, this year GCC 15 added COBOL to the >suite of languages it compiles. > >_______________________________________________ >talk mailing list >[email protected] >https://lists.nycbug.org:8443/mailman/listinfo/talk
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