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Comment by retrac | Hacker News Reader

Old-style COBOL translates trivially to or from very brain-dead imperative style code with lots of goto.

If you can look past the syntax, modern COBOL is a decent enough compiled language, with most of the stuff you'd expect.

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> Old-style COBOL translates trivially to or from very brain-dead imperative style code with lots of goto.

Provided the target language supports "goto", and "fall through PERFORMs" :)

>If you can look past the syntax, modern COBOL is a decent enough compiled language, with most of the stuff you'd expect.

Probably < 1% of production Cobol uses any syntax newer than Cobol 85!

I can't look past the syntax.

What’s wrong with the syntax? It is essentially English with some minor rules attached.

Like with C family vs. ML family vs. APL vs. Pascal family debates, some people consider those sort of syntax differences to be deal-breakers. I personally try to keep an open mind.

I hope we can agree that APL does not fit the list here. It does not even have words!

(;-))

I've come to take, "If you can look past the syntax..." as a semantically void formulation that is only there because its presence is mandatory whenever you're making a statement about a language that doesn't look like C.

In general, I agree with you, but you could apply it in reverse: "C function pointer declarations can be useful, if you can look past the syntax."

If it's any consolation, COBOL isn't a very interesting language, nowadays, despite its syntax. I had to suffer it a couple of decades ago, and I would never wish it upon anyone.

And I'm untroubled by syntax; I'd happily use C-like languages, ML languages, Lisps, etc. COBOL just isn't a good or interesting language nowadays, if it ever was.

Old school COBOL is very wordy, and full of program sections and divisions of dubious value, half of them seemingly redundant (source: I've written some while working at a bank, a few decades ago).

It feels as if you were writing something like this:

   Program Name The Program.
   Author the_af
   Data section.
   Some numbers.
   X 1.
   Y 2.
   Actual code section.
   Program beginning.
   About to start.
   Let's do this.
   Add X and Y, Giving Z, Z Being the Addition of X and Y, but not of W nor V. U is right out. 
   Having Computed Z, Z Being The Addition of X and Y, Z is therefore the Result.
   Give Result.
   Program End.

Ok, this is a parody, but it's also what writing COBOL feels like -- or at least, what it used to be like. And somebody thought because these were "English words", that this would somehow enable less technically minded programmers accomplish their tasks.

But sometimes you just want to write:

    f(x, y) = x + y

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