>>>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

In 1985-86 I used a COBOL version that had procedures (so, not everything was a big program), no GOTOs and as far as I remeber, it was pretty powerful. It's true that it was on punched cards, but also expect that COBOL was improved in the last 12 years like any other language.

Vlad