Board:   [DoveNet] Programming
Subject: Cobol/gnucobol
From:    Dumas Walker
Date:    Tue Jun 24, 2025 10:02

@VIA: CAPCITY2
>  DW> Once upon a time, I considered writing a program to do something like tha
>  DW> with my model railroad equipment. I eventually figured out that keeping i
>  DW> all in spreadsheets with gnumeric was sufficient enough. ;)

> Well, tobe honest, part of the plan was to make a comparison like
> "the cobol/mainframe way" and "the unix way", i.e. using standard shell
> tools to manipulate CSV. I found out sc-im as a terminal based spreadsheet.

Fun fact... on the mainframe, I had to writeseveral cobol programs to
manipulate CSV files.  We'd get data from sources that either used Excel
spreadsheets or that were onPC systems that could only create CSV files.
I would upload them and then run the cobol program to parse them into
fixed-lengthdata files to be processed against our data.

I got pretty good with STRING and UNSTRING.  ;)

> Ages ago, in 1999, my mentor invented the noSQL term (you can search him on
> wikipedia).

I am curious so I will have to see if I can find that.

> It was based on shell only, using sed awk and other standard
> tools. I wrote an extended article about it on Linux Journal. Although
> Ican't recall much, I have a grasp on how powerful shell could be.

Shell can do a lot, but being able to code your own solutionwhen you can't
get the desired results from shell is a big, big plus!

> Plus, I recently joined the FreeBSD bandwagon. I trulyadmire how some
> FreeBSD have mastery on shell. If you look at the CBSD management tool
> source code, feels like reading C++ instead of shell. Kudos to them.

I have tried BSD out a couple of times, usually just to test/play with on a
second-hand machine, but have always stuck with linux.  I would say that,
too me, it seemed too similar in some ways to motivate me to change.

> I know, a csv/ods/xls can be as powerful today, aka "the poor man's
> database", but it was an excuse to learn COBOL.

Yeah, if you want to learn to program, or want to be creative, then using
spreadsheets isn't going to scratch that itch.  ;)  I heard an old COBOL
programmer say once that, if you can learn COBOL you can learn anything.
Despite what "they've" been saying for years,you can still find a demand
for that skill in banking and government shops, especially.

> Also, I am a model railway lover, although I lack the space and time
> so I just had a few models of the (real) trains I used to play with
> when I was a kid. My father used to work for the local railway company,
> so I was not an estranger to it.

Over the years, I didn't have the space to do what I wanted, and then not
the time.  I feel like I have enough of both now to get back into working
on it.  Right now, I amworking on a coal mine scene.

>  DW> One thing that some people have difficulty with when going from
>  DW> another language to COBOL is that, although the code reads like English,
>  DW> they are not used to needing to define all of their variables in working
>  DW> storage. For some reason, that just seemed logical to me.

> I don't feel that as a huge issue for me. Many languages need to define
> the variables at the beginning. It's just in a separate section.

I remember that from Pascal.  You did have to define things but, yes, there
was no separate section.  I think I prefer the separate section approach.

> I'm much more dealing now with the limits of the programming language,
> as many things aren't built-in. Ex. generating a random string is not
>as straightforward as I'm used to. But I get it, it was a language
> that was born in the 60s, a lot of stuff just wasn't there.

That, and it was meant for business computation and data manipulation.  A
business or government entity probably didn't have as much of a need for
random data back then so there was no reason to program for it.

For other applications, like trying to write a simple game, generate a
password, etc., having the ability to generate random data is much more
important than it would have been then.


 * SLMR 2.1a * I'm easy to please ... as long as I get my way
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