From: "stephen brackenbury" <stephen.brackenbury@canrem.com>
Subject: re; why cobol for the
Reply-To: "stephen brackenbury" <stephen.brackenbury@canrem.com>
Organization: Canada Remote Systems
Distribution: alt
Date: 4 Jan 93 00:37:27 EST


01/02/92 Steven Polsky writes:


SP>1) There are a zillion COBOL programs already out there and they need to be
SP>maintained. It may be easier to modify a program that re-write it if the
SP>modifications are minor.

Agreed.  I work in a support environment with hundreds of COBOL
programs many of which were written in the early 1970's.  The programs
are old work-horses that have done the job over the years and as the
customers' business changes the programs can be modified to meet the
changing business needs.

Most companies simply cannot afford to rewrite their entire systems in
another language - especially in hard times when there would have to
be a pretty darn good business case and pay-back for such a monumental
investment!

But lest we be blind - these Cobol programs won't be around forever!
As we migrate to the PC environment these old chesnuts will be replaced
with slick client/server GUI environents where Cobol has yet to show
itself as a real force to be reckoned with.

Currently new mainframe system development companies are moving
to CASE tools - code generators that can significantly speed up development
and construction time.  These code\generators can leverage programmer
experience and knowledge of the COBOL environment and limit the cost of
re-training an existing workforce to learn a new coding environment.
                                                     
SP>2) For business applications, COBOL gets the job done easily.  Its such
SP>a simple language to work with. Scientific applications are another story.
SP>However, if I need to generate a report, I'd rather use COBOL that C.

Yes and No.

Yes it's a simple language to work with.  The constructs are simple and
it can be made to be very English-like and therefore very easy to
understand.  It can be learned fairly quickly and easily.

No because those same simple constructs also restrict its flexibility.
Cobol does not always offer the programmer a simple or elegant coding
solution to a problem the way say Pascal does.

Simple things such as initializing a variable with a string of
hexadecimal or binary values is awkward in Cobol and requires work
arounds.

Coding Cobol with complete descriptive English-like datanames etc is a
very time consuming task.  That is why CASE tools with data dictionaries
and Cobol macros are making big in-roads in the Cobol environment today.

I don't find report generation in Cobol particularly nice.
Moving all those headers around and keeping track of print lines
not to mention the original pain-in-the-neck of laying out the report on
the page - it's not quick or friendly.  I prefer to have Cobol create
data files and then use something like EasyTrieve to generate the reports.

SP>3) Object COBOL is coming!

I really don't think object Cobol will make that much of a difference to
an already restrictive language.  From the little I've read on it it's
sounds like there's the whole new problem of "Object Management" when a lot
of organizations are still trying to cope with "Source Code Management".

Also Object Cobol will require a whole new programming paradigm where
currently "Structured Programming" is it.  Again, can you
build a bullet proof case for re-training your entire work-force
to use Object Cobol?  Generally knowing the size of Cobol shops and the
snail's pace that new technology gets implemented it will be too late.

IMHO I think that Cobol will be around for a while yet.  It's death
won't be instantaneous, it will slowly wane.  As we move more and more to
distributed processing and development of PC front-ends to mainframe
applications the Cobol environment will inevitably disappear as we enter
the year 2000.  By then, with microprocessor technology basically doubling
every 16 months there won't be a need for the mainframe after the year 2000
(not even as a power server!!!).  And with the mainframe out of the way and
powerful quick and easy to use PC and Client/Server development environments
a la "Visual Basic" et al, Cobol will be a chapter in history.
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