COBOL and Fortran won’t die, they’ll just be certified with StarDates.
//m
On Wed, 17 Jun 2026 at 11:30 am, Paul Koning via cctalk <
cctalk(a)classiccmp.org> wrote:
On Jun 16, 2026, at 8:55 PM, Fred Cisin via
cctalk <
cctalk(a)classiccmp.org> wrote:
On Tue, 16 Jun 2026, Bill Gunshannon via cctalk wrote:
And COBOL... Don't forget COBOL.... :-)
That's the best example.
There is also FORTRAN
Fortran
APL
ADA
Pascal
RPG
BASIC
Assembly language (35? years ago, UC Berkeley's revised curricula for
CS, Clancy and Harvey said, "Nobody prograns in assembly language any more,
nor ever will again")
COBOL was recently added to the GCC compiler suite (as was Modula-2 and
Algol 68). And gfortran sees lots and lots of development; it seems that
various fields use it extensively still. Weather forecasting seems to be
one example.
And ADA has been and remains an active part of GCC, too. Not to mention
that it's the foundation of VHDL (and the open source GHDL simulator is
written in Ada).
As for assembly language, that certainly is still alive. A FORTH package
I use extensively on the Raspberry Pico is written mostly in Forth, but the
rest in assembler -- no C to be found anywhere at all. For that matter,
you can't program the Pico's programmable state machine engines in anything
other than assembler, for the simple reason that nothing else will serve
when you only have 32 words of program memory.
paul