Re:What modern programming language is the best replacement ...
by mikewarot on Monday December 27, 2021 @05:51AM
(#29701351)
Caution I'm not, nor have I ever been, a COBOL programmer... I'm an old Pascal programmer with a strong opinion, trying to provide an answer.
The main feature of COBOL when it started was that it didn't require the programmer to write in machine code. Since then, like any programming language, various implementations were better optimized for the programmers than others. If you have a large COBOL program, it likely is very old, and contains decades of knowledge, and any effort to port it to another language will involve the painful process of rediscovering all those decades worth of assumptions and conclusions.
As for features, it was good at processing RECORD based information. with nested structures in those records.
The main feature of COBOL when it started was that it didn't require the programmer to write in machine code. Since then, like any programming language, various implementations were better optimized for the programmers than others. If you have a large COBOL program, it likely is very old, and contains decades of knowledge, and any effort to port it to another language will involve the painful process of rediscovering all those decades worth of assumptions and conclusions.
As for features, it was good at processing RECORD based information. with nested structures in those records.