OpenCOBOL ping

[btiffin]

Hello everyone;

Exciting days for OpenCOBOL system development. In My Grumpy Old Guy Opinion.

Aside from the uber complete COBOL-85, 2002 cobc;

We've got linkage to libCURL for netting, Perl for perl-ling, Lua for mooning, SQLite and libDBI for squealing, SpiderMonkey for javascripting, Tcl/Tk for tickling, a shiny new TikiWiki for quickeling, and the potential to watch the compiler grind over 98 million lines of source code (one compiler feature missing and in trial). Just received email from INCITS to move the flag forward on getting access to the text of the COBOL technical specification for our Reference Manual, and if that flies, then I plan on extending the GeSHi cobol.php syntax highlighter with URLS => support for quicklinks on every reserved word.

Just bumped into the gentleman that wrote a .NET COBOL compiler (early).

Plans are afoot for a Java layer towards a UNO OpenOffice.org interface.

And more ... All coming together in a few scant hours... (ok, 72, but still; 45 years old and so giddy over a development system that I gotta spew this post).

In a slowing economy, an industrious entrepreneur could score some large (and small) scale deals with this setup, me thinks.

Cheers,
Brian
http://opencobol.org

[Zeroth]

I'm curious as to what kind of strengths OpenCOBOL has. The problem is that it may be seen as a project around a "dead" language. Has the language design been advanced? Does COBOL offer some particular strength, like say, number crunching, fast compilation, True Strict Type Checking(check Haskell and Erlang I believe for samples of how this works)? What advantage is there to using this language over other more modern languages?

[btiffin]

Advantages; Old age. Disadvantages; Old age.

OpenCOBOL is the first freely available COBOL compiler I've experienced that is "complete". Very few standard features are missing from this implementation.

Dead language? Well that depends on who you believe. Argumentatively, the Gartner Group places the world's total lines of code at 300 billion. COBOL is 200 billion of that total. 2/3rds of all the worlds production source code is COBOL. Why do you never hear about it? COBOL is very much a vertical market development environment. Banks, Governments, Big Iron. These boys don't chat on the Internet about work. Their work is secret clearance or above. The jobs are not usually openly advertised, the employers will approach cherry picked talent (by and large).

Differences that a scripter may notice? COBOL is one of the few, if not only, languages meant to be read by management. COBOL is one of the few, if not only, PICTURE based data declaration languages.

Benefits to some young up and comer; 200 billion lines of code written by baby-boomers. Midrange age just a hairwidth from retirement.

Advantages to corporations; no leaks, no buffer overflows, underflows. The PICTURE data declarations mean that dynamic memory allocation is not part of the culture. It is possible; OpenCOBOL has BASED memory, ALLOCATE and POINTER types, but it is not part of the "culture" of banking or other security conscious environments.

OpenCOBOL is young for COBOL. Release 1.0 hasn't had it's first birthday yet; December 27th, 2007. The compiler generates C code, so it is both fast to compile and fast on execution. COBOL has evolved with the times. Sure there is GO TO, but recent COBOL compilers (not OC yet, but we are in planning) include Object features. A COBOL programmer pretty much requires a firm grasp of computer science and programming methods. Most if not all the methods and paradigms.

Disadvantage to script kiddies; COBOL requires a level of discipline that the average MTV viewer may not have. All ok in my book, as banks and governments should not include infrastructure built by people with 4 second attention spans. Which is partly why I mention OpenCOBOL on compsci.ca. I'm of the opinion that this board is chock full of members that would be more than capable of building sound, secure and solid infrastructure systems.

Disadvantage for others; I'm writing the documentation.

And the reason for my original post; OpenCOBOL can now be the hub of a multilingual solution, with C, Perl, javascript, Lua, Tcl/Tk and more to come.

I'll be glad to rah rah biss boom bah for OpenCOBOL anytime someone may listen.

Cheers
Edit; added some well deserved praise for the compsci membership