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by BasiliusCarver 2213 days ago
I wanted to learn a little bit of COBOL so I could have a better understanding of the code underpinning a large amount of the money that flows through our banks. I found it quite enjoyable and it's less scary than I anticipated given the reaction I've seen from a lot of developers. If anyone has pointers for how I could improve this feel free to hit me with a PR.
1 comments

Would you mind sharing any resources you found helpful along the way? Might wanna pick it up on the near future
I started by copying a COBOL helloworld program and working through the concepts on https://www.tutorialspoint.com/cobol It's very lightweight but that's what I was after. What I wish I had done from the start was compile with all warnings (-Wall) because it would have caught a few things like me assigning constants to variables (pictures in COBOL) that were not the right size so they were silently truncated at runtime