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From: Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid>
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: COBOL, Article on new mainframe use
Date: Fri, 16 Aug 2024 23:37:32 -0000 (UTC)
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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.