>>>>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
>>
>>Matt,
>>
>>To be frank, I wouldn't bother to start. Attempts have been made over the last 10 years to create a "Structured COBOL", but personally I consider the phrase to be an oxymoronism. There are some things that you have to do via the dreaded GOTO.
>>
>>Many COBOL programs bear little, if any, resemblance to anything you're use to seeing. Line oriented (line has a line number) and everything's in one big program. The file structures are defined at the beginning of the program, but after declarations regarding the operating environment. The closest thing that you might have seen is old BASICA programs.
>>
>>George
>
>I have written a few apps in COBOL, and never in one instance had to stray from a structured design. There was never any GOTO structure involved. From my experience, top-down methodology is all in design, and is rarely dictated by language restrictions. Line numbers in COBOL are used for debugging reference only and are system assigned. Code is not accessable through a line number. COBOL is a very powerful, but nonetheless cumbersome language, and I agree, it will be around for a very long time. (There are even 2 VISUAL COBOL packages now available... I playe around with Fujitsu's, it's prety cool). BTW, if you watch the comp.software.year-2000 group, you will find that $45/hour is on the EXTREMELY low side for COBOL programmers willing to dive into the Y2K nightmare. While still in school last year, I sent my resume and a bunch of COBOL that I had written to a Y2K contracting firm and was IMMEDIATELY offered a job starting at $30/hour, and promised $45 within a year. Keep in mind
>that there was no professional programming experience on my resume. Experienced COBOL programmers are billing on the upside of $100/hour, and that rate is climbing every month. Only idiots are signing long term contracts in that arena, because if one plays her cards right, Y2K will pay off the house and car. If you are motivated by $$$, can take highly stressful 60 hr/week contracts, and know any COBOL at all, I strongly urge you to check out the Y2K scene.
>
>Erik

Erik,

The COBOL you're talking about bears little resemblance to that which was available just 10-11 years ago. As recently as 5-6 years you couldn't even get a PC version of a full blown ANSI standard COBOL compiler. It was just too big for the system limitations at the time.

Yeah, it may be ancient (in PC terms) history, but do you think all those applications have been upgraded? I doubt it.

What made Top-Down design so difficult back then (we even had to use a line editor and no autonumbering) was the inability to modularize the design. You couldn't just simply pull the pieces together, because it was mostly one big, monolithic program. And, yes, GOTO (I swear to Nicholas Wirth) was the only way to get some things done.

One of the jokes that made the rounds was that every COBOL programmer had completed exactly one program and was still modifying it.

Unfortunately, I'm not that motivated by money (it helps pay the bills, but there are other, more important, things in my life), and highly stressful 60 hour weeks aren't my cup of tea (the again, even tea isn't my cup of tea, either :-)). I've got a couple of granddaughters that I'd like to see grow up.

Good Luck with Y2K project, and I hope you won't need a rubber room after working with some of the old stuff.

George