

Is COBOL really understandable after 14 years? - michael_dorfman
http://trustafriend.com/articles/index.php?operation=display_article&article_id=2&title_caption=Is%20COBOL%20really%20understandable%20after%2014%20years?

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thwarted
The few COBOL programs I've seen (or had to deal with the output of) always
seemed to handle fixed-width fields. Does COBOL have support for variable-
width fields? And how would this lessen the verbosity of those record
definitions? Modern regular expression and scattering assignment in scripting
lanaguages

    
    
      (name, address1, address2, city, state, zip) = record.split(/\t/)
    

is somewhat self-documenting also. Dealing with fixed-width records even in
modern languages can be pretty verbose

    
    
      name = substr(0, 40)
      address = substr(41,60)
      ...
    

as well (and the regular expression for fixed-width record parsing can easily
become visibly unparsable, sometimes even if you use things like the /x
modifier in perl).

I'd like to see a side-by-side comparison of COBOL vs modern scripting
languages for some common tasks like report generation. And I'd like to see
how COBOL tackles something hairy like extracting data from consistently
defined but unregular inputs like HTML or wiki markup (this is fresh on my
mind: I just was writing some perl/shell scripts last night to generate
structured data from a bunch of pages on wikipedia), which is a more "modern"
problem than the stock COBOL example of fixed-width reports.

Any links to show how COBOL really shines? Where using COBOL is a significant
win from an understandability and maintainability standpoint?

