#1: Why COBOL? Author: rgk, Posted: Thu Feb 20, 2003 12:56 am — Can anybody tell me why COBOL is still used when C is supported in mainframes. Whomever i ask this, they just tell me that COOBL is suitable for busineess oriented programming.But i am not convinced. Whatever we can do with COBOL can be done with C as well as something that cannot be done with COBOL can also be done with C. Then why COBOL?
I don't know whether my question is silly;but still longing to know the answer.
Thanks
Kannan
#2: Author: DaveyC, Location: Perth, Western AustraliaPosted: Thu Feb 20, 2003 6:53 am — C was designed for writing operating systems and is very dependent on the use of pointers. COBOL was designed for writing record oriented business programs and has very poor support for things like pointers and bit twiddling. COBOL gives the programmer better protection, array subscript checking etc.
COBOL has been the language of choice for writing business programs for decades on IBM mainframes, billions of lines of code. Most COBOL programmers are not interested in learning a language like C.
What you should be asking is why PL/1 never took off, which is similar to C but has many of the features of COBOL.
