Subj : Cobol/gnucobol
To : Dumas Walker
From : Darknetgirl
Date : Wed Jun 18 2025 02:20 am
Re: Cobol/gnucobol
By: Dumas Walker to DARKNETGIRL on Tue Jun 03 2025 09:44 am
Hey there!
Apologies for the huge delays.
My life is quite bumpy :-/
DW> Once upon a time, I considered writing a program to do something like that
DW> with my model railroad equipment. I eventually figured out that keeping it
DW> all in spreadsheets with gnumeric was sufficient enough. ;)
Well, to be honest, part of the plan was to make a comparison like
"the cobol/mainframe way" and "the unix way", i.e. using standard shell
tools to manipulate CSV. I found out sc-im as a terminal based spreadsheet.
Ages ago, in 1999, my mentor invented the noSQL term (you can search him on
wikipedia). It was based on shell only, using sed awk and other standard
tools. I wrote an extended article about it on Linux Journal. Although
I can't recall much, I have a grasp on how powerful shell could be.
Plus, I recently joined the FreeBSD bandwagon. I truly admire how some
FreeBSD have mastery on shell. If you look at the CBSD management tool
source code, feels like reading C++ instead of shell. Kudos to them.
I know, a csv/ods/xls can be as powerful today, aka "the poor man's
database", but it was an excuse to learn COBOL.
Also, I am a model railway lover, although I lack the space and time
so I just had a few models of the (real) trains I used to play with
when I was a kid. My father used to work for the local railway company,
so I was not an estranger to it.
DW> One thing that some people have difficulty with when going from
DW> another language to COBOL is that, although the code reads like English,
DW> they are not used to needing to define all of their variables in working
DW> storage. For some reason, that just seemed logical to me.
I don't feel that as a huge issue for me. Many languages need to define
the variables at the beginning. It's just in a separate section.
I'm much more dealing now with the limits of the programming language,
as many things aren't built-in. Ex. generating a random string is not
as straightforward as I'm used to. But I get it, it was a language
that was born in the 60s, a lot of stuff just wasn't there.
