By bloid
via trustafriend.com
Published: Sep 01 2008 / 05:34
COBOL has been in the news quite a lot recently and I have been reading that there are still huge amounts of COBOL code running and being written. This led me to wonder why this language was still being used. I therefore decided to look at a few sites about COBOL and see what they said was good about the language. The main benefits appeared to be that it is portable and self-documenting. Indeed‚ I often read about how COBOL programmers say that they can go to code written 10-15 years ago and still easily understand what is happening.
Comments
Topnotch replied ago:
"A similar program written in Java‚ the new standard in the business world‚ would be considerably more complex and difficult to understand."
Not sure what prompted this observation from the author but it couldn't be from experience. It's ironic that COBOL was designed to be understood and possibly even written by businessmen and other non-programmers but looking at the extremely WORDY source listing for such a simple program truly suggests otherwise.
I am certain that a comparable(and simpler) Java or C# program could be written in MUCH fewer lines of code.This reminds me of my nightmare COBOL projects from college.
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