Re: J4 - presentation/discussion on "Future of the COBOL Standard"

"Pete Dashwood" <dashwood@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote in message
news:63jqf7F27lussU1@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Despite the claim of billions of lines of existing code (dubious at
best;
it
> has been eroded yearly for the last 5 years (at least...) at a rate of
> millions of lines every year, by replacement with packaged solutions,
> refactoring, and migration to Java and other solutions...), even the
most
> optimistic observer cannot see an expanding future for COBOL as a
procedural
> paradigm based language in a world that is increasingly more visual and
more
> non-procedural.

Just a couple of notes from an "optimistic observer". <g>

"COBOL (COmmon Business Oriented Language) is the
programming language most widely used for commercial
and administrative data processing." -- Micro Focus LRM,
probably from the COBOL 85 standard.

The most common paradigm for "commercial and
administrative data processing"  is "clerks performing
procedures on or with data". COBOL came into existence as
a domain-specific language for impementing that paradigm.
Regardless of the implementation paradigm (procedural, OO,
functional, etc.) the result will neccesarily reflect the underlying
procedural basis for the required data processing. I suspect
that a great deal of programming with OOPLs is procedural
programming; but incorrectly claimed to be OO.

The expanding role for COBOL comes from the addition of
general-purpose programming language features in 2002;
features that complement the domain-specific features. Once
the general-purpose features become widely available and
discussed, more "multilingual" programmers can become
comfortable with "I can do that in COBOL".