> -----Ursprungligt meddelande----- > Från: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU] > För John Gilmore > Skickat: den 16 februari 2013 20:25 > Till: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU > Ämne: Re: Article for the boss: COBOL will outlive us all > > 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.
COBOL is certainly not a programmers language. It's very restricted by its syntax and functionality and is often very clumsy to use. But that is also a feature: it's hard to obfuscate - which can be seen as an asset from the point of maintenance and security. (Which do not mean that you can't make unintelligible programs - I have seen many - but not at the lowest level.) It's also helpful when you need to understand the underlying data structure the program is based on. Regards Thomas Berg ________________________________________________________________ Thomas Berg Specialist z/OS/IT Delivery SWEDBANK AB (Publ) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
