Re:COBOL has been "dead" for so long, my grandpa wrote about it
by amelius on Tuesday October 01, 2024 @04:16PM
(#41713615)
Can't we just apply a bunch of correctness preserving translations towards a modern PL, perhaps aided by an LLM to keep the source as human readable as possible, while (I'm stressing this) preserving correctness?
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Re:COBOL has been "dead" for so long, my grandpa wrote about it
by exhilaration on Tuesday October 01, 2024 @04:29PM
(#41713744)
IBM offers just such a service under the WatsonX branding, it's an LLM to convert COBOL to Java:
https://www.ibm.com/products/watsonx-code-assistant-z
I work at a company with a large COBOL codebase and this has been mentioned in a few presentations about our modernization efforts.
Re:COBOL has been "dead" for so long, my grandpa wrote about it
by russfink on Tuesday October 01, 2024 @06:29PM
(#41714958)
But is the conversion maintainable by a human? I’ve seen Fortran to C translators that end up encoding state transition machines that are impossible to read.
Re:COBOL has been "dead" for so long, my grandpa wrote about it
by grammie on Tuesday October 01, 2024 @05:41PM
(#41714533)
You should take a look at my company. Heirloom Computing. Heirloom.cc We have migrated many mainframe application and millions of lines of cobol and pl1 into Java and deployed it into production on prem and into the cloud.
Re:COBOL has been "dead" for so long, my grandpa wrote about it
by refneb on Tuesday October 01, 2024 @04:40PM
(#41713867)
How did that go?
My employer is going to try snd evaluate watsonx product.
Have you had any luck converting large/complex COBOL modules ?
Re:COBOL has been "dead" for so long, my grandpa wrote about it
by artificialLimbs on Wednesday October 02, 2024 @05:17PM
(#41725056)
Don’t know about COBOL, but we recently threw some ancient RPG 3 programs into ChatGPT for conversion to both ‘plain English’ and PHP and it got pretty close - maybe 80-90%.