>>You folks are cracking me up with this COBOL stuff. I cut my teeth on COBOL and did it on VAXes for years while teaching myself dBase, Clipper, Fox and now VFP.
>>COBOL is not going to go away anytime soon. Hell, my wife is a mainframe programmer for the IRS and she'll undoubtedly make her career doing COBOL for them for the next 25 years until she retires.
>>
>>With all the talk about whether VFP is going to be around or not, maybe everyone ought to give some thought to teaching yourselves COBOL....hehehehehe.
>>
>>Steve Despres
>
>Well, to continue the more serious side of this thread... where would you start? I'm self-taught in every language I know (except Pascal). But it's usually been a sink-or-swim lesson. I've never worked near COBOL programmers and I've never seen it. What's it like, say compared to Pascal, or C or even Fox?
>
>Matt

start
Identification Division
Jen's demo of what she remembers from programming school
Environment Division
Doesn't run worth a shit on PCs
Data Division
Ultimately nit-picky 99 levels of data structures ideal for technical data
Did an airline tech. inventory in it every part down to nuts and bolts had
a part number
Procedure Division
this is where you put the code which is similar to BASIC.
end

I learnt this stuff back in the days of punch cards. If I didn't like my job I'd go for the $45/hr stuff in a flash. I intend to be retired before we have to deal with the year 3000.

Jen
(planning to live forever, or die trying)