Cobol will work 2

[gphuber]

Hello at all

I am leading the support in an german softwarehouse. Only for information today my boss gave me some problems i shall put them away with databeses. Our programm is writte in Delphi. I told him that i will write in cobol. His answer i know you are an "dino" but i know it will work. So something for lauphing in this world.

Goetz

 

[Crox]

COBOL will stay important at least until 2030.

 

[Dimandja]

Why 2030, Crox?

 

[MarcLodge]

5 minutes before he posted perhaps?

 

[Crox]

Hi,

because:

1)IBM thinks so.
2)The installed base in COBOL, regarding the amount of lines of code at the Y2k scene, makes this very probable.
3)The management of the bigger financial institutes are still focusing on COBOL
4)Some popular products (not my choice!!!) like COOL:GEN generate COBOL for mainframe use.
5)Look at the sales of COBOL compilers.
6)Some years ago I upgraded a system that contained sources from 1968. It is still working and it probably will for the next 30 years.
7) Alle hypes didn't make it. When I started in 1979, they warned me that COBOL would vanish.100 4Gl's were born and died. Pascal was important at that time. After that it became C. Later on it was C++. Now Java is important. I am now even learning it. But only to use it to interface business applications with the environment. People are talking about language# and dot.net stuff. No language seems to become as important as COBOL. There is no big installed base, certainly not in mainframe environments....
8) I like it!

It is for sure that COBOL will be the most important computer language for a long time.

Regards,

Crox

 

[Dimandja]

Crox,

My question was why not certainly (instead of "at least&quot beyond 2030? Is there something 'magical' about 2030?

Dimandja

 

[kkitt]

This is a Y2K Issue. Year less then 30 then century is 20 else century is 19.

In-house codeing done here was with a input file that contain the year and the before and after century,

rdr-year = 50
rdr-cc1 = 20
rdr-cc2 = 19

when current year less then rdr-year then move rdr-cc1 to century else move rdr-cc2 to century.

This way when current year becomes 50 then the values placed into cc1 will be 21 and cc2 becomes 20.

This can be configured by application if different ranges were need for an application.

And we hoped that we were not having to process any files that were over 100 years old.

 

[Crox]

Hi,

You are right. It will be at least until 2030.

Regards,

Crox

 

[Dimandja]

It sounds to me like this is a Y2K solution problem, rather than a COBOL specific problem.

 

[Dimandja]

I should mention that most COBOL code was not affected at all by Y2K. Applications required that the century be used.

 

[TonHu]

Well,

We all read item 8) Crox brought up, and I'm guessing he will retire around 2030 or so...s-)

Grtz,
TonHu

 

[CliveC]

Alas, by using a four position century date we are simply setting ourselves up for the y10k problem. Clive

http://tubularity.com

 

[AustinOne]

"Why 2030?"

Because by then, many of us COBOL dinosaurs in this forum and elsewhere will be either dead or so senile that they couldn't even bring us back from retirement to work on COBOL.

 

[Crox]

Possible. There was once a story of Goovoo. You would like to read it!