On 2/16/2013 12:25 PM, John Gilmore wrote:
Tony H wrote
| Now back to our regular COBOL, uh, programming.
thus alluding to how many of us view of the language.
Over a now long career I never took COBOL seriously. I was aware of
it, and I even learned to write it by helping COBOL programmers with
their problems. It is a verbose but finally very simple language.
That said, I could not, and did not, think much of a language without
real storage management, strings, pointers, booleans, etc., etc. It
was move-oriented, compile-time bound, and synchronous, and I find
these characteristics despicable.
Recently, however, it has been greatly improved, making, for example,
usable pointers and LIFO, local, i.e., 'automatic', storage available.
It is now often possible to write something the way one wishes to
write it in COBOL.
These new facilities are not yet much used. Some shops indeed
interdict their use as 'unnecessary'. Their availability does
nonetheless make it possible to update a COBOL application using
appropriate, adult technology; and this is important because many
COBOL applications are so large that jettisoning them is, at least in
the short term, economically impractical.
Able but naif people often radically underestimate the resources and
time that will be required to convert a COBOL application to, say,
C/C++; and in the upshot they fail in their attempts to do so. I
know of shops in which there have been four (sic) such failed
attempts. New CIOs often launch a new one, the smartest of them going
on to greener pastures before its failure too becomes obvious.
It is, however, possible to refurbish and extend COBOL systems in
COBOL. The trick in doing so is to use able programmers trained in a
different tradition whom you bribe to learn COBOL, avoiding [most]
experienced COBOL programmers as plague carriers or, better, using the
best of them only as consultants about how an application currently
works.
John Gilmore, Ashland, MA 01721 - USA
John,
We have been fighting that battle for, oh, twelve years
or more. We have courses that teach COBOL programmers
how to use the latest facilities in general and then
courses that teach specifics (especially handling XML,
working with Unicode, using LE services where appropriate,
coding and using DLLs, coding and running using z/OS UNIX
services, coding CGIs in COBOL, and more). But we don't
see much interest or enlightenment. Very frustrating.
--
Kind regards,
-Steve Comstock
The Trainer's Friend, Inc.
303-355-2752
http://www.trainersfriend.com
* To get a good Return on your Investment, first make an investment!
+ Training your people is an excellent investment
* Try our tool for calculating your Return On Investment
for training dollars at
http://www.trainersfriend.com/ROI/roi.html
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