For those worried about VFP and its future, herewith something written about Cobol in June 2000- see

http://www.softwarestrategies.com/web_first/ss.nsf/Contents/862568C90059D1D6862569140074017B?OpenDocument

Key points:

- Gatner Group says Cobol is far from dead and will survive for years
- Organisations like the IRS are paying big money to buy it
- The IRS was impressed with Cobol's robustness when it processed a million records in 40 minutes (gasp!)
- Cobol 2002, a new programming standard, will pick up OO features including Inheritance.

Perhaps "joining the Cobol Club" isn't something to dread after all.

Regards

JR

< snip >
Cobol lives!
IRS Turns to Venerable Programming Language for Taxing Efforts
Reports of its death have been greatly exaggerated. Cobol, the programming language that has serviced companies' data management needs for more than four decades, has survived Y2K and is far from pushing up daisies.

Jim Duggan, a research director at the market research firm Gartner Group, tells Cobolreport.com that most companies can't afford to rewrite or replace existing programs in Java, C++, or other programs, so they might as well keep their Cobol-based programs. He says Cobol provides a basis for large applications that will be used for many years because of its flexibility and its ability to permit source-level modification and revision by heterogeneous development teams. It helps that software vendors, such as Computer Associates, IBM, and Merant, offer tools that integrate programs with existing Cobol code into, for example, Java-based programs.

That news must be comforting for the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), which recently decided to invest close to $1 million in a Cobol-based solution for its National Computer Audit Specialist Group. The IRS purchased the Cobol Enterprise Edition product from Fujitsu Software Corp. (www.adtools.com) to help audit computer records of large corporations.

The IRS was looking for a Windows-based system that would prove to be robust when it came to combing computer records. In one test during the product-selection process, Fujitsu reports that its Cobol system was able to process files containing a million or more records in 40 minutes.

The IRS is not the only organization recognizing the staying power of Cobol. The International Organization for Standardization is currently developing Cobol 2002, a standard that will incorporate object-oriented features such as class, object, inheritance, and interface definitions into Cobol programs. This will further help Cobol in its integration and migration into the Web-based future.