Re: [PLUG] Book: Modern Mainframe Development

Not having used COBOL directly but having seen code examples, like the Fibonacci sequence ones on Rosetta Code, it looks insanely arthritis-inducing. I get the idea is for it to be readable for a pretty broad spectrum of different types of workers but I think Smalltalk nailed it down better with a mixture of terse algebraic syntax and syntax more like English language. APL is the other extreme opposite COBOL and Smalltalk sits in that nice golden mean.

On Mon, Apr 11, 2022, 00:21 Steve Litt via plug <plug@lists.phillylinux.org> wrote:

JP Vossen via plug said on Sat, 9 Apr 2022 15:00:24 -0400

>While this may seem OT for this list, it's not.
>
>I've just started reading a 2022-03 _Modern Mainframe Development_
>book (345 pages), and I find it really interesting. Thus far it has
>made a compelling case for the strong demand side of skilling up in
>COBOL and IBM mainframe technologies. This is pretty interesting too:
>https://github.com/search?q=COBOL.

I've always thought that COBOL has gotten a bad rap. It has built-in
ISAM, which is pretty darn cool. Except for hitting the hardware
directly, in COBOL you can do most of what you can do in C,
including recursion. I don't know if you can pass references
to paragraphs or linked procedures in order to make callbacks. My only
real complaint about COBOL is that paragraphs can't have their own local
variables: Variables are local to the compiled source file only, so you
need to use CALL to call procedures linked in from other files.

SteveT

Steve Litt
March 2022 featured book: Making Mental Models: Advanced Edition
http://www.troubleshooters.com/mmm
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