Cobol Research Premier research in Cobol is ongoing at the Universiteit Van Amsterdam. You've heard other programmers talking about languages like Perl, Python, and Rexx. The language processor is left to figure out this information on its own. Scripting Cobol Scripting languages complement, more than compete, with Cobol. Another common co-operation between Cobol and scripting languages is in testing.
Scripting languages make great vehicles for automation of regression tests.
Enterprise-class vendors including Cisco, Oracle, and Sybase are known to have huge suites of product test scripts in Tcl and other languages. An example gives some sense of this. We append the results of each run. The test command knows how to compare results and report on their compliance or non-compliance. Notice this language doesn't require declarations.