05/30/2009 04:28:11 PM EST

I worked at the USMC Computer Sciences School at Quantico VA and CAPT Hopper would drop by for us to take her to lunch at one of the nearby town restaurants, as she enjoyed talking shop with the school's instructional staff. Later, I worked at the Pentagon and enjoyed frequent informal lunch-time gatherings when her presence would attract a number of junior officers for informal discussions. Your article failed to mention that one paramount piece of COBOL of keen interest to the business community that has been a trademark of COBOL all its life, namely its handling of decimal currency that is so dear to financial industry. Its rules for rounding of currency transactions led eventually to the daily compounding of interest in savings accounts used now universally, once the banks found that a penny here and there added up over time to real money. Until newer languages have the same rigid decimal currency handling rules as part of the language standard, COBOL will continue to be preferred. The risk of using other languages is too high. Your statement that new COBOL project are extinct is not exactly true, as new systems are being delivered all the time that interface with existing systems. The language is kept current by standards organization and now has object-oriented ability to use objects. Most corporations using COBOL understand, finally, that their investment over 4 or 5 decades is too large to change all at once, and they are approaching modernization in small steps.

United StatesBruce E Hogman

05/31/2009 09:07:51 AM EST

Yay for COBOL, I learnt it years ago and loved it bcoz it was so easy to understand.. I still dabble in it as a hobby but not as much as I would like too, and with the lack of COBOL tutors, i see many COBOL programming put on hold.. Hopefully many more communities will run classes and teach COBOL.

Australiawayne

06/01/2009 02:55:46 PM EST

I remember the first database report generator I every saw. I had been coding COBOL reports for a few years and it seemed like a useful COBOL report program was at least 3 to 5 pages, often 20 or more. The report generator could build a report in just minutes and it was only 6 or 8 lines. I was just blown away. BUT, when I got into a detailed report I would sometimes find that the generator wouldn't QUITE get the format of a variable or a summary the way I wanted it, and I remember thinking, "I could do this in in a couple of lines of code and the reporting format in COBOL!". I could often get the generator program to create what I wanted by using some temporary variables, but that often "cost" about 20 lines of "stuff" and several hours of trial and error. Every so often, though, I just could not figure out how to do what I wanted and usually wished I had just taken the time to create a COBOL report program in the first place. Like any language or developement environment, COBOL had strong points and weak points. The versions I used did not seem to be particularly well suited to an interactive environment since they often did not have very robust exception handling, But I really prefered to do maintenance on COBOL programs than any other, just because the programs were often very straight forward.

United StatesDavid Hammerquist