George,

Permit me to "correct" a few of the things you have said. . .

1) COBOL is not (repeat: NOT) a line-oriented programming language. It bears *NO* resemblence at all to BASICA.

2) The is now a structured COBOL. While I have not seen it, I know that IBM has delivered it and I think Micro Focus has one too.

3) GOOD COBOL is somewhat "wordy", but then the objective of COBOL (acronym for COmmon Business Oriented Language) was exactly that as far as its PROCEDURE DIIVISION was concerned. A statemnt might read. . .
ADD EXTENDED-COST TO SALES-TAX GIVING TOTAL-COST as opposed to some language's. . .
tcst = amt+stx
*or*
IF CUSTOMER_HAS_PREFERRED_STATUS. . . as opposed to
IF cstat = "P". . .
Unfortunately that aspect of COBOL is the first to suffer with many programmers, rendering as useless as any other language.

Like anything else in any other business, working programs were built upon rather than replaced. Thus many companies have 196x programming in their primary systems. And in the 1960s-1990, disk space was so expensive that save two bytes by loping off the century save companies lots of $ while improving response!
The real mistake came in keeping the old programs alive, NOT in keep COBOL alive. 15 year old cars and machines generally just die, but some thing which are maintained well, like airplanes and COBOL programs, live much longer.

Cheers,
Jim N

PS When well done, COBOL is the clearest programming language of them all! ANYONE can read and understand a well-written COBOL program PROCEDURE DIVISION (which is all that really matters in such a program).

>>>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