Re: COBOL, Article on new mainframe use

On Fri, 16 Aug 2024 14:14:51 -0000 (UTC), John Levine wrote:

Back when I was in school it was fashionable to sneer at COBOL, but I
don't think many of the people doing the sneering knew anything about
the language.

I avoided COBOL at University for the most part. Then in my first job
after graduating, I spent about eight months of the first year writing
COBOL code.

So don’t tell me I don’t know anything about it.

And yes, I still sneer at it, even more so.

For example, it has coroutines implemented in a very
useful way.  I doubt any of them knew that, and at the time, very few
other languages did.

Really?? You’re not talking about that “ALTER ... TO PROCEED TO ...” crap,
are you?

The current version of COBOL has a lot of extensions over the 1960s
version which should be no surprise.  The current versions of Fortran
and C are a lot bigger than the classic versions, too.

Fortran at least has been quite nicely rethought in its extensions, from
Fortran 90 onwards. It even has a kind of generic type.

COBOL still doesn’t have a good, standard way to deal with those
dynamically-generated SQL queries I was talking about.