What's the bright side of Cobol? [closed]

Answer 1

MOVE CORRESPONDING

Say you had 2 classes in C#, which had some fields in common, for example, class A has Name, Age, and Sex, plus some other fields... class B has those same 3 fields, plus some others of its own. The only way to copy the fields would be:

a.Name = b.Name;
a.Age = b.Age;
a.Sex = b.Sex;

In COBOL, you just write:

MOVE CORRESPONDING A TO B

Answer 2

It also has an interesting feature when declaring variables... at the place of declaration of the variable, you can also declare some possible values of the variable and label them with booleans. You can use

IF [boolean_label]

instead of

IF [variable] IS [value]

which is especially nice if the values are not particularly meaningful (i.e. magic numbers or even magic strings)... those magic values only appear in the declaration of the variable and are nicely labeled with what they mean.

You can even set the variable to one of these values with:

SET [boolean_label] TO TRUE

Answer 3

Oh, how could I forget...

Instead of:

if ((a == 3) || (a == 4) || (a == 10))

write:

IF A IS 3 OR 4 OR 10

Instead of:

if ((a == 3) || (a < b))

write:

IF A IS 3 OR LESS THAN B

Instead of:

if ((a >= 3)  && (a <= 10))

write:

IF A IS BETWEEN 3 AND 10

Answer 4

Another advantage... if you are programming on a mainframe, you can pretty much be sure that COBOL will be available... not true for any other languages. It's kind of like the C of the mainframe.

Answer 5

Longevity. The language I first learned in 1975 can be used to consume web services today.

Also, COBOL has a feature I hear people asking for every day. Given two records having fields of with the same names, you can do:

MOVE CORRESPONDING SOURCE-RECORD TO DESTINATION-RECORD.

and it will move the fields with the same name from one to the other, doing conversions as necessary. The lack of a feature like this is one of the barriers in the way of people adopting Data Transfer Objects for return from web services - you have to write the code to do the above, by hand, or use code generation.

I think there may have been an ADD CORRESPONDING as well, but I'm not sure. The memory begins to go, after a while...

Answer 6

It's very easy to learn. I have only written two COBOL programs in my life (to unpack COBOL ISAM files into a different format) and I learned all I needed to know in order to do it, with the help of a book,in an afternoon.

Oh, and it will impress on your brain the correct spelling of the word "environment".