Path: ...!weretis.net!feeder9.news.weretis.net!news.misty.com!news.iecc.com!.POSTED.news.iecc.com!not-for-mail From: John Levine Newsgroups: comp.arch Subject: Re: COBOL, Article on new mainframe use Date: Fri, 16 Aug 2024 14:14:51 -0000 (UTC) Organization: Taughannock Networks Message-ID: References: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Injection-Date: Fri, 16 Aug 2024 14:14:51 -0000 (UTC) Injection-Info: gal.iecc.com; posting-host="news.iecc.com:2001:470:1f07:1126:0:676f:7373:6970"; logging-data="83283"; mail-complaints-to="abuse@iecc.com" In-Reply-To: Cleverness: some X-Newsreader: trn 4.0-test77 (Sep 1, 2010) Originator: johnl@iecc.com (John Levine) Bytes: 3175 Lines: 39 According to Lawrence D'Oliveiro : >On Thu, 15 Aug 2024 22:06:16 +0300, Niklas Holsti wrote: > >> Dewar used to say that COBOL is the "Rodney Dangerfield of programming >> languages", which just "don't get no respect". > >Except people laughed *with* Rodney Dangerfield, whereas they laugh *at* >COBOL. For Dangerfield, it was just an act, after all: you don’t think his >real life was like that, do you? > >COBOL was designed specifically for “business” computing, back when there >was a clearly demarcation of what this meant: no need for complex >mathematical formulae, no need for string/text manipulation, no need for >interactive terminals. > >One major crack in this wall came with the introduction of relational >DBMSes, particularly ones using SQL as their interface language: suddenly, >the use of such databases became very much a core “business” need. > >The best way to interface to such a DBMS was to be able to generate SQL >strings on the fly; but this required some facility with manipulation of >dynamic, variable-length strings, which COBOL completely lacked. And so >special extensions were tacked on, just to cope with the generation of SQL >queries and templates. 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. 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. 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. For some kinds of work, COBOL is still an entirely reasonable language, albeit one where the learning curve can be pretty steep. -- Regards, John Levine, johnl@taugh.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies", Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. https://jl.ly