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Speaking of COBOL ...

M. Edward (Ed) Borasky

10/14/2006 3:17:00 AM

Interesting article on the future of COBOL ... perhaps a COBOL to Ruby
translator would ease some pain?

http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articl...
8 Answers

Andrew Libby

10/14/2006 1:11:00 PM

0


My guess is that the need to use COBOL has to do with the
present investment these companies have in systems already.
I highly doubt that organizations that are newish are using
it (or if they are it's minor in comparison to older orgs).

Now, I do think that a translator would be super cool though.

Andy



M. Edward (Ed) Borasky wrote:
> Interesting article on the future of COBOL ... perhaps a COBOL to Ruby
> translator would ease some pain?
>
> http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articl...
>
>

--
Andrew Libby
Tangeis, LLC
Innovative IT Management Solutions
alibby@tangeis.com

M. Edward (Ed) Borasky

10/14/2006 3:57:00 PM

0

Andrew Libby wrote:
>
> My guess is that the need to use COBOL has to do with the present
> investment these companies have in systems already.
> I highly doubt that organizations that are newish are using it (or if
> they are it's minor in comparison to older orgs).
>
> Now, I do think that a translator would be super cool though.
>
> Andy
>
>
>
> M. Edward (Ed) Borasky wrote:
>> Interesting article on the future of COBOL ... perhaps a COBOL to Ruby
>> translator would ease some pain?
>>
>> http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articl...
>>
>>
>>
>
A COBOL refactoring IDE written in Ruby! Sounds to me like
meta-programming at its finest. At one point long ago, I thought it
would be a good idea to learn COBOL, but I gave up on it and stayed with
FORTRAN and assembler. Then all kinds of interesting things happened,
like character sets including lower case, the Cuban Missile Crisis,
System\360, and the Vietnam War. Maybe now is a good time to take up
COBOL again. :)

Could you say COBOL is a domain-specific language for maintaining COBOL
legacy code?

<ducking>

Matt Lawrence

10/14/2006 5:12:00 PM

0

M. Edward (Ed) Borasky

10/14/2006 5:57:00 PM

0

Matt Lawrence wrote:
> On Sun, 15 Oct 2006, M. Edward (Ed) Borasky wrote:
>
>> A COBOL refactoring IDE written in Ruby! Sounds to me like
>> meta-programming at its finest. At one point long ago, I thought it
>> would be a good idea to learn COBOL, but I gave up on it and stayed with
>> FORTRAN and assembler. Then all kinds of interesting things happened,
>> like character sets including lower case, the Cuban Missile Crisis,
>> System\360, and the Vietnam War. Maybe now is a good time to take up
>> COBOL again. :)
>>
>> Could you say COBOL is a domain-specific language for maintaining COBOL
>> legacy code?
>
> Don't dismiss all of the ideas in COBOL so quickly. For decades it has
> been the only mainstream language to do decimal arithmatic. It also has
> some excellent page formatting capabilities, also missing from
> mainstream languages.
>
> All of this can easily be done in Ruby, unlike many other languages.

Ah ... so Ruby is not mainstream? Perhaps an ability to refactor legacy
COBOL will make it mainstream in spades!!

I always wondered why decimal arithmetic was built in to microprocessors
from day one, while floating point was added only later. Now I know ...
more COBOL legacy code than FORTRAN legacy code. :)

Page formatting? Isn't that built into Perl, which I think is
"mainstream"? "Practical Extraction and *Reporting* Language", right?

Matt Lawrence

10/14/2006 7:14:00 PM

0

John W Kennedy

10/15/2006 12:26:00 AM

0

Matt Lawrence wrote:
> Don't dismiss all of the ideas in COBOL so quickly. For decades it has
> been the only mainstream language to do decimal arithmatic.

PL/I, RPG, and Ada from Ada 95 on. And they all avoided the horrible
botch in COBOL's precision handling that was not fixed until COBOL 2002
(and is still only optionally fixed).

--
John W. Kennedy
"The blind rulers of Logres
Nourished the land on a fallacy of rational virtue."
-- Charles Williams. "Taliessin through Logres: Prelude"

John W Kennedy

10/15/2006 12:28:00 AM

0

M. Edward (Ed) Borasky wrote:
> I always wondered why decimal arithmetic was built in to microprocessors
> from day one, while floating point was added only later.

Actually, no. Decimal arithmetic in microprocessors goes back to the
original market that Intel invented microprocessors for in the first
place -- desk calculators.

--
John W. Kennedy
"The blind rulers of Logres
Nourished the land on a fallacy of rational virtue."
-- Charles Williams. "Taliessin through Logres: Prelude"

Rick DeNatale

10/15/2006 1:11:00 AM

0

On 10/14/06, John W. Kennedy <jwkenne@attglobal.net> wrote:
> Matt Lawrence wrote:
> > Don't dismiss all of the ideas in COBOL so quickly. For decades it has
> > been the only mainstream language to do decimal arithmatic.
>
> PL/I, RPG, and Ada from Ada 95 on.

Not to mention quite a few implementations of SQL. Certainly a
mainstream language albeit not a full programming language.

--
Rick DeNatale

My blog on Ruby
http://talklikeaduck.denh...