Subj : Cobol/gnucobol
To : DARKNETGIRL
From : Dumas Walker
Date : Tue Jun 24 2025 09:02 am
> DW> Once upon a time, I considered writing a program to do something like tha
> DW> with my model railroad equipment. I eventually figured out that keeping i
> 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.
Fun fact... on the mainframe, I had to write several cobol programs to
manipulate CSV files. We'd get data from sources that either used Excel
spreadsheets or that were on PC systems that could only create CSV files.
I would upload them and then run the cobol program to parse them into
fixed-length data files to be processed against our data.
I got pretty good with STRING and UNSTRING. ;)
> Ages ago, in 1999, my mentor invented the noSQL term (you can search him on
> wikipedia).
I am curious so I will have to see if I can find that.
> 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.
Shell can do a lot, but being able to code your own solution when you can't
get the desired results from shell is a big, big plus!
> 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 have tried BSD out a couple of times, usually just to test/play with on a
second-hand machine, but have always stuck with linux. I would say that,
too me, it seemed too similar in some ways to motivate me to change.
> 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.
Yeah, if you want to learn to program, or want to be creative, then using
spreadsheets isn't going to scratch that itch. ;) I heard an old COBOL
programmer say once that, if you can learn COBOL you can learn anything.
Despite what "they've" been saying for years, you can still find a demand
for that skill in banking and government shops, especially.
> 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.
Over the years, I didn't have the space to do what I wanted, and then not
the time. I feel like I have enough of both now to get back into working
on it. Right now, I am working on a coal mine scene.
> 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 remember that from Pascal. You did have to define things but, yes, there
was no separate section. I think I prefer the separate section approach.
> 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.
That, and it was meant for business computation and data manipulation. A
business or government entity probably didn't have as much of a need for
random data back then so there was no reason to program for it.
For other applications, like trying to write a simple game, generate a
password, etc., having the ability to generate random data is much more
important than it would have been then.
* SLMR 2.1a * I'm easy to please ... as long as I get my way
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