Path: ...!eternal-september.org!feeder3.eternal-september.org!news.eternal-september.org!.POSTED!not-for-mail From: Lawrence D'Oliveiro Newsgroups: comp.arch Subject: Re: COBOL, Article on new mainframe use Date: Fri, 16 Aug 2024 23:37:32 -0000 (UTC) Organization: A noiseless patient Spider Lines: 30 Message-ID: References: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Injection-Date: Sat, 17 Aug 2024 01:37:32 +0200 (CEST) Injection-Info: dont-email.me; posting-host="2f6569ba74567209943555c21330457a"; logging-data="1697161"; mail-complaints-to="abuse@eternal-september.org"; posting-account="U2FsdGVkX1+q3PF5pUcOSK3D/2xZxxwI" User-Agent: Pan/0.159 (Vovchansk; ) Cancel-Lock: sha1:D+jefWFldhG7RBrdB2/e5jhmkNo= Bytes: 2257 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.