COBOL Thread

Let's discuss COBOL aka ""COmmon Business-Oriented Language", a mysterious language of the ancients. Have you considered taking the plunge into the world of COBOL? They say great wealth and reward await you, but at the cost of your happiness. Much of the world runs on COBOL, but few people today know anything about it.

Is there any resources for learning COBOL?

>>13158 >Much of the world runs on COBOL I think it depends on the cuntry your in. I checked and found 2 jobs in my cuntry with the world COBOL in the description. One offer mention it as nice to have, and the other looked as outsourceing to other cunrties. To be honest i did heard that a lot of software is writen in it in the US, just not here

Cobol is utter crap, forget about it.

I've considered learning COBOL and someone who did use it professionally gave me two books on it. I'm partway through STRUCTURED COBOL FUNDAMENTALS AND STYLE and it's a good book, I think. The book I'll be reading after that is ADVANCED STRUCTURED COBOL. Both of these are by Tyler Welburn. The main issue is learning other languages is better and more useful. Why learn COBOL when I can learn Ada 2012, instead, which is what I'm doing? I may seriously reread to my point in the first book and then continue, at some time, though.

>>13165 i did not managed to find those books, but i managed to print helloworld with this book and opencobol compiler. Where is my money?!

>>13161 https://thenewstack.io/cobol-everywhere-will-maintain/ 220 billion lines of COBOL are in regular usage internationally.

>>13168 Lets look at that article for a second. They mention: >Bank of New York Mellon >Department of Defens >Commonwealth Bank of Australia (replaced its core COBOL platform in 2012) >First Niagara Financial Group in Buffalo >U.S. Department of Justice and the Treasury Department >Department of Homeland Security >Social Security Administration >company in northern Texas named COBOL Cowboys >75 schools in the U.S. that were still teaching COBOL Most of that is in the US, so like I argued its maybe popular in US but not everyware. In my country (midle Europe) it's just not used (maybe never been used). C, C++, Python, Perl, Ruby (rerly), R (yes R is more popular in my city then Cobol in my country), Java (offcourse), JavaScript YES, but almost NO Cobol.

>>13165 How is ada 2012 more useful than cobol? Cobol has more jobs

>>13167 thanks for the pdf. ive always wondered about cobol but never really checked it out. but installing it all on the computer seems too much hassle for now. i thought i would just read to begin with. but now i found its possible to write and run programs online: https://www.tutorialspoint.com/compile_cobol_online.php https://www.jdoodle.com/execute-cobol-online https://paiza.io/en/projects/new?language=cobol

This post triggers a sense of nostalgia in me. COBOL was the third language I learned after BASIC and C. I'm going to really date myself here. COBOL was taught as part of a high school computer science class I took. I never had a chance to use it professionally and probably never will.

>>13174 >How is ada 2012 more useful than cobol? Cobol has more jobs I like how Ada is designed for practicality and safety and whatnot. Also, Ada has functionality specifically for interfacing with COBOL programs if necessary. I'm not interested in a language purely for getting a job, although Ada is still used in defense, aviation, and other such things.

>>13158 I would like to but I would also like to keep my sanity, the language semantics seems extremely horrible.

>>13191 Most clueless fuarrrktards argue that a language that has a lot of jobs is a useful language. A language is useful if it is Turing-complete, but Turing-completeness doesn't guarantee safety, so I would argue that safety and turing-completeness is the parameter for a good programming language now adays but some people do not learn at all. >exhibit a: Javascript JavaScript is an extremely horrible and convoluted language and should be burned on the stake given the chance, I don't even know why this is still around when WebASM is already available.

>>13193 english might not be the best language but it's used all over the world so it's useful to learn.

>>13175 im on win10 (yes yes i know...) and it seemed so bothersome to install gnucobol but then i remembered that ive got kali linux installed (yes its available as an "app" on win 10) so all i had to do was "sudo apt-get install gnucobol". super easy.

>>13193 it is useful to get the bills paid ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

>>13193 and good luck building a webapp without javascript

>>13167 i have found a problem in this book. (or maybe the problem is that i'm using gnucobol?). anyway, on pages 93-94 there is this example program that is in pic related (except its beginning but it's not important). the thing is that when running this program all i get is a line that says "Date is OK". it doesnt even ask me for a number. to get it to work i had to change "88 ValidCodeSupplied VALUE 0 THRU 8." to "88 ValidCodeSupplied VALUE 1 THRU 9" (and to make it sane i changed all those other values in EVALUATE from 0 to 8 into 1 to 9 instead). but the thing that makes it work is to change the 0 in "88 ValidCodeSupplied VALUE 0 THRU 8." to a 1. it seems as if a 0 will give the program a 0 before even asking me for a number and therefore think that i gave it a 0 and just print out "Date is OK". why is this? is it just because i use gnucobol or is there something wrong in the code? i will continue further in the book anyway but it would be helpful to know why this is.

>>13273 >messy post trying to be clearer: i have found a problem in this book. (or maybe the problem is that i'm using gnucobol?). anyway, on pages 93-94 there is this example program that is in pic related (except its beginning but it's not important). the thing is that when running this program all i get is a line that says "Date is OK". it doesnt even ask me for a number. to get it to work i had to change "88 ValidCodeSupplied VALUE 0 THRU 8." to "88 ValidCodeSupplied VALUE 1 THRU 9" (and to make it sane i changed all those other values in EVALUATE from 0 to 8 into 1 to 9 instead). but the thing that makes it work is to change the 0 in "88 ValidCodeSupplied VALUE 0 THRU 8." to a 1. it seems as if a 0 will give the program a 0 before even asking me for a number and therefore think that i gave it a 0 and just print out "Date is OK". why is this? is it just because i use gnucobol or is there something wrong in the code? i will continue further in the book anyway but it would be helpful to know why this is.

What is your favourite editor for writing cobol? I started out with nano but it doesn't show column numbers. Then I tried ne and its nice but I can't stand the gray background behind the black. Any suggestions to which editor I should try next? I want it to be simple like nano and ne and also to be free software. If only nano could show column numbers or ne have an all black background... perhaps it can be done?

>>13333 >If only nano could show column numbers I just found how to get column number to show in nano. Open ~/.nanorc and write: set constantshow But maybe there are other editors that are more suitable for writing cobol anyway?