COBOL
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Chris Meech's post[^] piqued my interest because I've been talking to a few guys lately, on the quiet so as not to bust their cover, who do COBOL. So it got me wondering: who's doing COBOL directly, or at the least, interfacing with COBOL modules or back end systems?
cheers, Chris Maunder The Code Project | Co-founder Microsoft C++ MVP
Eeewww! I tried COBOL exactly once, in college. Ten lines (cards) of code, 106 lines of preamble, 157 error messages, and not one of the computer center experts could find a single error in my program. Never again... X|
Will Rogers never met me.
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My first programming gig was COBOL for a Sunny Canadian insurance company, Haven't touched it since though.
Henry Minute Do not read medical books! You could die of a misprint. - Mark Twain Girl: (staring) "Why do you need an icy cucumber?" “I want to report a fraud. The government is lying to us all.” I wouldn't let CG touch my Abacus! When you're wrestling a gorilla, you don't stop when you're tired, you stop when the gorilla is.
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Chris Meech's post[^] piqued my interest because I've been talking to a few guys lately, on the quiet so as not to bust their cover, who do COBOL. So it got me wondering: who's doing COBOL directly, or at the least, interfacing with COBOL modules or back end systems?
cheers, Chris Maunder The Code Project | Co-founder Microsoft C++ MVP
And just today a coworker that somehow shares department with us (she is administrative staff, administrative as in "secretary") got all excited because after 2 years of requesting career change, she is finally transferred to dev, guess in charge of what? you got it, ticket support for the old-as-dinosaurs system which is written in COBOL. Of course, she was all excited about it and came running to tell us...to be brought to earth by our straight faces telling her, COBOL has been dead since 20 years ago... Sadly enough, some of the guys of the corner, to whom no one talks to, grabbed her and say they are the COBOL experts in the company...as they still develop and maintain systems, and that they'd be her teachers... :wtf:
"Whether you think you can, or you think you can't--either way, you are right." — Henry Ford "When I waste my time, I only use the best, Code Project...don't leave home without it." — Slacker007
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Eeewww! I tried COBOL exactly once, in college. Ten lines (cards) of code, 106 lines of preamble, 157 error messages, and not one of the computer center experts could find a single error in my program. Never again... X|
Will Rogers never met me.
You either left out a period (one of my missing '.'s generated over 1000 error messages) or maybe a blank card between the source code and the link instructions (done that too - CDC 3150 mainframe) :rolleyes:
Steve _________________ I C(++) therefore I am
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Chris Meech's post[^] piqued my interest because I've been talking to a few guys lately, on the quiet so as not to bust their cover, who do COBOL. So it got me wondering: who's doing COBOL directly, or at the least, interfacing with COBOL modules or back end systems?
cheers, Chris Maunder The Code Project | Co-founder Microsoft C++ MVP
Received a listing last week for an opening at a large Canadian bank - they want essentially 6+ years exp in 'mainframe MVS, COBOL, JCL Utilities, and databases such as DB 2 and IMS'. For a 4 month contract. :| Not quite my skill set - will pass on to anyone who wants. and yeah I did a little COBOL in school - and actually liked it kinda - don't tell anybuddy ok?
This sig no verb.
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Chris Meech's post[^] piqued my interest because I've been talking to a few guys lately, on the quiet so as not to bust their cover, who do COBOL. So it got me wondering: who's doing COBOL directly, or at the least, interfacing with COBOL modules or back end systems?
cheers, Chris Maunder The Code Project | Co-founder Microsoft C++ MVP
Chris Maunder wrote:
So it got me wondering: who's doing COBOL directly, or at the least, interfacing with COBOL modules or back end systems?
My company has a few products that use a mixture of COBOL and RPG.
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Chris Meech's post[^] piqued my interest because I've been talking to a few guys lately, on the quiet so as not to bust their cover, who do COBOL. So it got me wondering: who's doing COBOL directly, or at the least, interfacing with COBOL modules or back end systems?
cheers, Chris Maunder The Code Project | Co-founder Microsoft C++ MVP
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Chris Meech's post[^] piqued my interest because I've been talking to a few guys lately, on the quiet so as not to bust their cover, who do COBOL. So it got me wondering: who's doing COBOL directly, or at the least, interfacing with COBOL modules or back end systems?
cheers, Chris Maunder The Code Project | Co-founder Microsoft C++ MVP
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You either left out a period (one of my missing '.'s generated over 1000 error messages) or maybe a blank card between the source code and the link instructions (done that too - CDC 3150 mainframe) :rolleyes:
Steve _________________ I C(++) therefore I am
Yup, it was a CDC, though I don't recall the exact model, as I wasn't a member of the priestly caste, and was never admitted to the holy sanctum. Circa 1975 - 1977 would be about right for that model, I think.
Will Rogers never met me.
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Chris Meech's post[^] piqued my interest because I've been talking to a few guys lately, on the quiet so as not to bust their cover, who do COBOL. So it got me wondering: who's doing COBOL directly, or at the least, interfacing with COBOL modules or back end systems?
cheers, Chris Maunder The Code Project | Co-founder Microsoft C++ MVP
I am still actively coding COBOL.
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Chris Meech's post[^] piqued my interest because I've been talking to a few guys lately, on the quiet so as not to bust their cover, who do COBOL. So it got me wondering: who's doing COBOL directly, or at the least, interfacing with COBOL modules or back end systems?
cheers, Chris Maunder The Code Project | Co-founder Microsoft C++ MVP
No, I decided to go down the disclosure route - I made mention of my COBOL heritage in my profile. Sad reality is that if I ever get another commercial development gig it will be COBOL.
Ger
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Pah! I was developing software on the System 36 and 38 when the AS/400 was still project Silverlake!! Dinosaurs? Proto-bloody-zoa mate!
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Well if the vasectomy broke your heart, I'd strongly urge you to seek alternate medical services. I'm no doctor, but I'm pretty sure that's not how it's supposed to work.
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Jim Crafton wrote:
Well if the vasectomy broke your heart
Hardly
Jim Crafton wrote:
I'd strongly urge you to seek alternate medical services.
Too late, jobs done
Jim Crafton wrote:
I'm no doctor, but I'm pretty sure that's not how it's supposed to work.
Wasn't the most pleasent of everprience whilst being awake during the op.
Software Kinetics Wear a hard hat it's under construction
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Same here... I think our AS/400 accounting system is COBOL, but I reach it through HTTP/XML queries... But back in the 90s, I did spend part of a summer teaching an old COBOL programmer transition to VB...
Proud to have finally moved to the A-Ark. Which one are you in?
Author of the Guardians Saga (Sci-Fi/Fantasy novels)It could be worse, I had to port an RPG program to C once, now that was painful.
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No, I decided to go down the disclosure route - I made mention of my COBOL heritage in my profile. Sad reality is that if I ever get another commercial development gig it will be COBOL.
Ger
I know a company that still uses COBOL. It was their language standard because the managers had written in it prior to becoming managers. The AS/400 still has a COBOL compiler and they still add new featrues to it. They also support RPG in several different flavors. I've developed many programs in COBOL and RPG. They are like any other language, write the instruction properly and it will produce the expected results. COBOL is very wordy compared to most languages today and that seems to be its biggest downfall.
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Chris Meech's post[^] piqued my interest because I've been talking to a few guys lately, on the quiet so as not to bust their cover, who do COBOL. So it got me wondering: who's doing COBOL directly, or at the least, interfacing with COBOL modules or back end systems?
cheers, Chris Maunder The Code Project | Co-founder Microsoft C++ MVP
I work at a company that has an IBM Mainframe for the main part of the business. I develop .NET applications that must interface with it and its done in 2 flavors, TCP/IP Sockets interfacing with COBOL and a middleware solution that interfaces with the COBOL to expose web services. Its arcane and extremely difficult to code for. Needless to say my error handling techniques are top notch! And we employ at least 40 COBOL programmers to maintain the mainframe. Good news is the system is converting out of the mainframe but it will take 2 years to do it.
- D. Schrenker ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ "If we knew what we were doing, it wouldn't be called research." - Albert Einstein
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Chris Meech's post[^] piqued my interest because I've been talking to a few guys lately, on the quiet so as not to bust their cover, who do COBOL. So it got me wondering: who's doing COBOL directly, or at the least, interfacing with COBOL modules or back end systems?
cheers, Chris Maunder The Code Project | Co-founder Microsoft C++ MVP
I get pings from recruiters now and again because they see COBOL (from 1997 and earlier) on my resume. Despite the fact that I list technologies such as ASP.NET 4, Linq, Java, et cetera first on my resume, they somehow operate under the delusion that I'd be interested in going backwards 20 years in time. I did get an email yesterday from someone wanting experience with (among other things) EDL. For those that don't know, EDL was an assembler-like language which ran on IBM Series/1s. IBM discontinued those beasts in the early 90s-ish. Where I was working at that time did some kind of translation to C on RS/6000s becuase that was clearly more sensible than writing the system natively. Sigh. I was almost interested enough to write back to this recruiter and ask how her client is still running EDL 20 years after IBM discontinued support for the hardware on which it ran, but that passed. Actually, that wasn't a horrible way to start out development. Tiny little boxes, so it forced you to be conscious of resources. Debugging was getting a paper listing, which had the machine code printed to the left of the EDL code, setting breakpoints at memory addresses and interrogating data by address. Learned a lot more about what's "under the hood" than I suspect is common today. Even though there were some good experiences, I sure am glad to have moved on.
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'Probably' interfacing to a COBOL system 'somewhere'. Our app communicates to everything via FIX and so for all I know there's a COBOL system out there, somewhere, talking ot us. :~
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I have to process data from ABNAmro - it arrives as a big, variable content but fixed length record, text file and is obviously generated from an old COBOL system because the (PDF!) data description for the records uses various COBOL number formats. The newer fields, however, tend to use slightly more 'conventional' number layouts... As I have a system here for reading COBOL data directly providing the schema is available, I did ask if they had an original or XML schema, but got no reply 8) So I had to recreate the schema 'by hand' - what I actually did was use Access to build relationship and field descriptor tables and then I wrote a bit of VBA to emit an XML schema from that, which - when fed into the data editor - allowed me to read the records held therein...
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Chris Meech's post[^] piqued my interest because I've been talking to a few guys lately, on the quiet so as not to bust their cover, who do COBOL. So it got me wondering: who's doing COBOL directly, or at the least, interfacing with COBOL modules or back end systems?
cheers, Chris Maunder The Code Project | Co-founder Microsoft C++ MVP
Did teach Cobol in evening school in my local college for a year; Was "formally" taught Cobol by my first full-time employer (I'd used Fortran for previous commercial work) In school, my first major project was - don't laugh - a Cobol interpreter, itself written in interpreted Basic. We had a dial-up link to a University machine, had to enter code via punched tape. Having learnt the entire Basic language syntax I wanted more, had heard of Cobol, and wanted to learn it. So got a couple of books on its syntax and wrote an interpreter, so I could write some Cobol programs. With all i/o being either via the keyboard or punchtape, even double-interpreted cobol ran fast enough to keep up with whatever input you threw at it. Wasn't a complete Cobol implementation, but was a true subset and some of the programs subsequently compiled and ran first-time on IBM360 mainframes... That was back in 1969 so this is my 6th decade of programming... :omg: and whilst I still use "Basic" I've not used Cobol for almost 20 years.
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Chris Meech's post[^] piqued my interest because I've been talking to a few guys lately, on the quiet so as not to bust their cover, who do COBOL. So it got me wondering: who's doing COBOL directly, or at the least, interfacing with COBOL modules or back end systems?
cheers, Chris Maunder The Code Project | Co-founder Microsoft C++ MVP
I was working on COBOL directly until just over 2 years ago when my contract wasn't renewed. Haven't worked on COBOL since. But I was mostly a COBOL programmer for 25+ years, with a little SQL, Access, and VB/VBA thrown in for the last few years. No COBOL now - just SQL, Access, and VB/VBA now - maybe some Java and/or .NET in the near future for me too. :) Jerry