[notfried]

> Well, there are quite a lot of rumors and stigma surrounding COBOL. This intrigued me to find out more about this language, which is best done with some sort of project, in my opinion. You heard right - I had no prior COBOL experience going into this.

I hope they'd write an article about any insights they gained. Like them, I hear of these rumors and stigma, and would be intrigued to learn what a new person to COBOL encountered while implementing this rather complex first project.

[082349872349872]

One of the rumoured stigma is that the object-oriented flavour of COBOL goes by the unwieldy name of ADD ONE TO COBOL YIELDING COBOL.

At least it doesn't have the unrumoured stigma of older FORTRANs, which ignored whitespace, allowing:

    DO 10 I=1.10

to silently compile an assignment:

    DO10I = 1.10

instead of signalling an error for the syntax of the loop the flight software programmer had intended:

    DO 10 I=1,10

[skissane]

> One of the rumoured stigma is that the object-oriented flavour of COBOL goes by the unwieldy name of ADD ONE TO COBOL YIELDING COBOL.

Which is a joke. Rather than an extension, the COBOL standard itself incorporates OO support, since COBOL 2002. The COBOL standards committee began work on the object-oriented features in the early 1990s, and by the mid-1990s some vendors (Micro Focus, Fujitsu, IBM) were already shipping OO support based on drafts of the COBOL 2002 standard. Unfortunately, one problem with all the COBOL standards since COBOL 85 (2002, 2014 and 2023), is no vendor ever fully implements them. In part that is due to lack of market demand, in part it is because NIST stopped funding its freely available test suite after COBOL 85, which removed a lot of the pressure on vendors to conform to the standard.

[userbinator]

No one seems to have written a Minecraft server in FORTRAN yet... but I think your comment just gave some people here ideas.

[shiroiushi]

Instead of FORTRAN, someone should try writing a Minecraft server in something like ALGOL or FORTH.

[superdisk]

Algol 68 actually isn't too bad of a language to work with, and there's a modern interpreter easily available. Unfortunately it lacks all support for reading and manipulating binary data so I think a Minecraft server would be nearly impossible.

[quuxplusone]

Or APL.

[kjs3]

If you have to go to 1977 or prior to slag a language, there are tons of languages that will disappoint you.

[PaulHoule]

PL/I

[pjmlp]

I would assess C++ has already outpaced PL/I complexity, and I do enjoy using C++.

[PaulHoule]

You can get a C++ compiler which is (more or less) correct, I'm not sure that was ever quite true of PL/I.

[pjmlp]

It was for IBM and Unisys, I imagine.

And then there is the whole DoD security assessment of Multics versus UNIX, where PL/I did play a major role versus C, so the compiler did work correctly enough.

Just this week we're discussing a VC++ miscompilation on Reddit.

[shakna]

IBM are still building and maintaining their PL/I compiler for z/OS, today. Though it is only compliant with specs up to 1979. The '87 ISO is only partially adopted.

[kjs3]

I get the distinct feeling it's been a long time since IBM wrote PL/I compilers considering anyone but IBM. So 'correct' here might be 'what IBM needs'. YMMV.

[Konohamaru]

I think Programming Language One is the same type as Eureka Seven.

[mnau]

Yeah, I love these insights.

If you are interested, here are insights from making a COBOL to C# compiler: https://github.com/otterkit/otterkit-cobol/issues/40

I am now convinced that COBOL is just a high level assembler.

[yjftsjthsd-h]

> I am now convinced that COBOL is just a high level assembler

In fairness, I think to some extent everything was just a high level assembler in its day, and then it never changed:)