Re: [open-cobol-list] On forum registration problems

[John Culleton]

On Sunday, August 07, 2011 03:28:43 pm William M Klein wrote:

> I strongly recommend AGAINST supporting the *full* 2002 COBOL Standard. It

> has as required a NUMBER of things that are now OPTIONAL in the draft

> revision (which should become official in the next year or so).

>

>

>

> for example,

>

> VALIDATE

>

> Report Writer

>

> WRITE file-name (not record-name)

>

> ARITHMETIC is STANDARD (Standard-Decimal and Standard-binary are new in

> the revision)

>

> Locale support

>

> Multiple Inheritance and Parametric polymorphism

>

>

>

Sounds like common sense has taken over. Perhaps the standard makers actually talked to working COBOL programmers for a change.

One problem is that the professors who teach COBOL in school (if there are any left) and most COBOL text book writers are for the most part people who never worked as a COBOL programmers. They like OO, they like Java, they like C++. So they try to bend COBOL to make it fit their predilictions. For a while it seems that the COBOL standard writers were of the same ilk.

COBOL will never be like Ruby, or Scheme, or any similar language. It has a different mission. It deals with very large data bases and the decimal arithmetic of accounting systems. Order Entry, Inventory Control, General Ledger, Payroll, Shop Orders, Mailing Lists: these are the tasks that COBOL does better than any other language. And it should read like plain English. To the extent practible is should have the tools to make it self-documenting, including all the paragraphs of the Identification Division as an agreed-upon template.

(End rant, I have to get ready for church.)

--

John Culleton

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