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by coldtea 2974 days ago
>While I generally agree with the "if it ain't broke" sentiment, you have to perform some pretty wild mental gymnastics to end up calling COBOL the "best tool for the job".

Do you? Lack of programmers, aside, it was created and evolved exactly for the kinds of jobs its used in.
1 comments
ams6110 2974 days ago
It is something of a DSL, as the name suggests (Common Business Oriented Language).

I would also disagree with GP that COBOL's semantics are really very foreign. Variable declarations, assignments, expressions, loops, conditionals, etc. are not that different from other imperative languages. More verbose, certainly, but not foreign.

JCL on the other hand....

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floatboth 2973 days ago
If it's similar to other imperative languages, what makes it a DSL? What is the domain of "business"?
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coldtea 2973 days ago
It's similar to other imprative languages in some constructs, it's very business application focused in others -- e.g. built-in support for forms, for monetary calculations and such.
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