Wow, when I said I'd like to hear why Cobol would be (or as you say "is") the wave of the future, I had no idea what I was getting myself into! I guess I'll have to reconsider the Cobol languange. I was dead wrong in saying that Cobol was not the wave of the future!

But as you say, Cobol is a very stable and sturdy platform for supercomputers and mainframes, and this is the wave of the future. Perhaps I should look into this language that is being cast in the shadow of C++, .NET, and Java...

Thanks for the insight!

DeFrog777

COBOL deals very well with the business of business -- char fields and numbers. It does decimal arithmetic. It protects programmers and the system from the misuses of pointers. It is easy to write and easy to read.

There are many dialects of COBOL and many OS environments and platforms in which it is used. I am familiar with Wang VS COBOL 74 and COBOL 85, which run in the Wang VS OS environment and make use of the Wang VS Integrated Editor. Source code editing, compiling and linking are generally done from within the Editor. The Wang VS also has an excellent interactive debugger which anticipated by many years the features now common in interactive debuggers.

The VS environment provides 17-way indexed files and rollback/rollforward recoverable file functionality at the OS level. No third party file systems, add-ins or plugins are needed.

The VS is a mainframe patterned closely after the IBM 360/370 but with an OS built to support interactivity from the ground up. The machine language closely matches the requirements of COBOL, with decimal arithmetic, packed decimal arithmetic, binary arithmetic and bulletproof string (field) operations. You can overrun an array if you're not prudent in your management of subscript values, but you can't overrun a field.

The Wang VS also now has a new hardware platform, finally freeing it from the legacy hardware of its 30-year lifetime and about a dozen generations of proprietary hardware since 1977. It now runs seamlessly on selected x86 servers, under Linux. "Seamlessly" means that the new platform runs the standard VS OS, all the utilities, all the dozen or so languages, and all the existing applications. The new platform is loaded from standard VS backup tapes. There is zero program or data conversion. Performance is up to twice that of the fastest legacy Wang VS ever made (ca. 1999).

You dug up this 2 year old post in the Java forum just to promote your mainframe and COBOL?

<boggle>