• Papamousse@beehaw.org
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    4 months ago

    I learnt COBOL (I’m old) it’s a very easy language, you basically talk, for instance to do c=a*b you write:

    MULTIPLY A TO B GIVING C

    and everything is tabbed, but in a good editor like emacs, it’s done automatically pretty well.

    • BeigeAgenda@lemmy.ca
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      4 months ago

      I was looking into learning COBOL some years ago, because i found that verbosity interesting.

      And it seemed like there’s not many libs and toolboxes out there, compared to the major languages that has libs for everything, so I couldn’t really use it for small projects.

      • connaisseur
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        4 months ago

        The issue with COBOL surely isn‘t about the language itself. The real challenge will be to decipher the spaghetti code that was created at a company in the last sixty or so years. And then to dare changing something without breaking the program as a whole.

        • BeigeAgenda@lemmy.ca
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          4 months ago

          That’s easy you just use the huge number of test cases to ensure against introducing new bugs.

          /S