17 Feb
2015
17 Feb
'15
11:37 a.m.
On 02/17/2015 10:54 AM, Roe Peterson wrote:
I wouldn't wish a COBOL career on my worst enemy.
What a god-awful mess.
Try *maintaining* the COBOL compiler for a couple of years. Mostly, you
sit with a pile of PSRs (program status/trouble reports) and the CODASYL
report, quoting chapter and verse to the submitter. Writing programs in
the stuff was actually fun after that...
...and then try maintaining a custom version of COBOL where you had
chains of communicating COBOL modules spread out over several
machines--and where a module could manipulate the data of another that
wasn't even resident in *any* machine's memory...
Good times--I've tried to forget about them. I really have.
--Chuck