Re:Learning COBOL: A Journey for the Modern Programmer
by CountHackulus on Wednesday April 07, 2021 @01:05PM
(#26727698)
This is more common than you might think. Back when I worked on a COBOL compiler at IBM one of our test cases was an "expert system" that turned ~20 lines of business-specific DSL into ~100k lines of COBOL. It was extremely un-fun to deal with.
Yes. But worse. And used in the real world.
Whilst I cannot give all the details for obvious reasons, when I was assisting a particular bank with translating some of their stack from COBOL to modern Fortran, part of the problem was that a large amount of their COBOL code was actually generated.
It wasn't a Pythonish-to-COBOL, though. It was a mix of the C-preprocessor and Bash that generated the COBOL code.
(Problem for me was that all source code was printed, and not stored anywhere digitally, so I had to restore that evil Bash/CPP script just to be able to restore the code I had to retype by hand).