[EdLUG] COBOL Prorammers ?

[Jeremy Nicoll]

On Sun, 5 Apr 2020, at 19:13, Mark Turner wrote:
> The article made me laugh, but COBOL is still good at what it does, 
> simple repetitive stuff on fixed width data files, and its very fast at 
> doing that.

A long long time ago I wrote a structured text editor (which worked a bit 
like an XML editor following a DTD in that it allowed the user to populate
variable length text fields within a predefined structure with optional
parts and nested sybstructres) ... in COBOL.  It wasn't - by a long way - my 
choice of implementation language, but it was the one my employers 
forced me to use.  Variable length strings were held in heap-like constructs
which - yes - did reside in fixed-width data files - but were sort-of paged in
and out of them.  That is the total amount of working storage in use for 
a large document was well in excess of the much smaller amount that the 
compiler was able to address at any one moment.   

-- 
Jeremy Nicoll - my opinions are my own.