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Whenever I read COBOL I am always amazed...well...that I can read it and get some gist of what is going on with relative ease.

I don't really want to participate in all the ceremony that goes into writing COBOL, but the end product is often more intelligible than code in some other languages I don't know.

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COBOL (or perhaps these days Cobol, lower-case) just received a new edition of its standard last year. By far its most major overhaul was in 2002, with the introduction of OO and recursion.

Not to say that you should be quick to build your startup on COBOL, but the present language is pretty tolerable. Most of the COBOL that actually runs, I think, is 74-era code, however. That is certainly painful.

It could always be worse, however. It could be MUMPS.

Most places that has kept its code "up to date" seems to run on the 85 standard with some newer stuff that was added in 89. End-ifs and such wasn't part of the language until then. The companies that hasn't put that much love into their COBOL code usually runs some home brewed version of a earlier standard.

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