I have been programming in COBOL for the past 7 years.  COBOL for .NET
-- it is anything but fun.  It takes the wordiness of COBOL and makes it
worse!  It's not just variables that are not local. Everything is global
in standard COBOL (variables, paragraph names, etc.)  Go from any point
to any other named paragraph. Now, COBOL for .NET does have methods with
local variables, IN ADDITION TO the global variable.  Trying to make
sense out of it is definitely NOT fun.  Trying to convert a standard
COBOL program, with everything global, to a .NET program is less so.

Marc

On 11/11/24 1:04 PM, Steve Litt wrote:
> During the pandemic there was a scarcity of COBOL programmers, so I
> re-studied COBOL using the GNU COBOL compiler. Unfortunately, the
> scarcity was filled before I was proficient. I'll tell you one thing
> though: I've always believed that COBOL was much better than its
> reputation with the Pascal/C hipsters of the 1980's. My only beefs with
> COBOL, and they're not showstoppers, are:
>
> 1. No local variables at the paragraph level.
>
> 2. No array bounds checking (but C doesn't have those either).
>
> COBOL has its own indexed file system, so you can write real data
> centered applications without all the login hassles of connecting to
> Postgres/MySQL/MariaDB/SQLite, and you don't need to depend on tricky
> SQL statements or learn the 1001 slight variations in SQL language.
>
> Of course, COBOL isn't as fun as Ada, C, Lua, Python, and Turbo Pascal.
> But fun isn't everything :-).
>
> SteveT
>
> Steve Litt
>
> http://444domains.com
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