Cobol

[OldProgrammer]

Where's the COBOL forum?

Just kidding ... although there ARE DotNet COBOL compilers from MicroFocus and Fujitsu ... pretty expensive though. But they have very inexpensive student versions.

[dilettante]

There are a number of Cobol products out there, though in recent years there has been some consolidation. I'm not aware of any decent "free" Cobol, and the few out there seem to be Cobol to C translators rather than actual compilers - and thus a pain to use.

Yes, a few compile to .Net IL, and even more compile to proprietary VM p-code for portability. I think at least one major product compiles to Java bytecode. There seem to be darned few products left that compile to native code under Windows anymore.

The existing vendors have quite a stranglehold on this market. None of them are very cheap and most of the "student" editions seem terribly crippled.

[OldProgrammer]

Well, it's still being used in some of the larger companies, many in the financial and banking field ... merging (and sometimes replacing) mainframe CICS code with PC based stuff.

But all in all, it's now generally too expensive for the small user ... and anyway, most of the programming "diva's" now think it's useless and obsolete.

Nevertheless, it still can't be beat for true business programming and reporting ... it handles currencies in a straightforward fashion like no other language. Most programs written for large businesses in COBOL were hundreds or thousands of lines long ... not because of COBOL itself, but because of the complexities of the applications.

I'm not particularly nostalgic about COBOL itself, because even after over 45 years as a programmer, I still really enjoy programming using both Visual Basic and C#. And at my age (74) it hopefully keeps my mind young with the mental exercises it causes. Anyway, I've written programs in many, many different languages and they basically all do the same thing ... with the only differences being syntactical.

Wonder how many people know what COBOL means?