Re: coud you send me informaition on cobol please.

Hello!

COBOL, eh? I wonder why…all right, here goes…

COBOL was an effort to make a programming language that was like natural 
English, easy to write and easier to read the code after you'd written it. 
The earliest versions of the language, COBOL-60 and -61, evolved to the 
COBOL-85 standard sponsored by the Conference on Data Systems Languages 
(CODASYL).

COBOL (Common Business-Oriented Language) was developed around 1960 by 
several computer manufacturers and the Pentagon, making it one of the 
longest-lived computer programming languages. Even though updates have 
been produced for COBOL, many serious programmers consider the language 
out-of-date.

Most of what COBOL was used for was database-oriented programming, though 
it didn’t have any search-and-retrieve modules for record criteria like 
dBASE or SQL. You could lay out an output format for the database, act on 
certain fields within the records, perform extremely basic mathematical 
functions (the basic four, I think was all) then print it out. (In 1975 
when I first learned COBOL, these were 132-column line printers; huge, 
clunky, and nightmarish things. Woe to the person who got to close to an 
open and active printer with a tie on!) Or you could store the output to 
magnetic tape or hard disks (which bear almost NO resemblance to what we 
use today!)

The reason why COBOL is not used much today is because it is over-verbose 
(requiring some three dozen lines of code to do something Perl or C++ 
could accomplish in two or three lines), hard to maintain (no simple fixes 
in this language).

Let’s see an example of this, shall we?

COBOL:
IDENTIFICATION DIVISION.
PROGRAM-ID. HELLO-WORLD.
* THIS PROGRAM PRINTS "HELLO WORLD"

ENVIRONMENT DIVISION.
INPUT-OUTPUT SECTION.
FILE-CONTROL.
DATA DIVISION.
FILE SECTION.

WORKING-STORAGE SECTION.
01	HEADER-1.
	05  FILLER			PIC X(13) VALUE "Hello, World!".
	05  FILLER			PIC X(119) VALUE SPACES.

PROCEDURE DIVISION.

100-MAIN-MODULE.
	WRITE HEADER-1
	STOP RUN.

PERL:
#!/usr/bin/perl
print "Hello, world!";
exit; <--this is even optional

What looks easier to you, then?

And of course it goes without saying that COBOL is about 70% responsible 
for the Year 2000 (Y2K) computer situation. Many dinosaur (pre-1980) 
mainframes had COBOL programs written back in the late 50s to early 70s 
that worked well enough for what they were supposed to do (payroll, 
employee reports, that sort of thing). And, of course, many management 
units (be nice!) thought that since the programs and equipment worked, 
there was no need to change/upgrade. Until the last two or three years.

About the only reason why anyone would study COBOL today is to understand 
it well enough to convert it into a more up-to-date language (again, like 
Perl or C++) and alleviate any Y2K problems or make things like database 
design/implementation more flexible (and a lot of people have made a lot 
of money because of this). Not to mention that COBOL is almost completely 
incompatible with anything Internet-related (except for one or two claims 
from COBOL products I see on the Internet), so again there’s that 
conversion factor for programming. Nonetheless, COBOL compilers 
(interpreters, really) are still available for PC, Mac, UNIX, LINUX, DOS, 
and OS/2. I have no idea why.

Try http://www.cobol.com/ for some more details I might have missed. This 
should be enough to start you out, though if you want a recommendation as 
to what programming language would be good to learn today, I would 
recommend C++ first (it’s near-universal, though tricky to learn), maybe 
Java (it’s still very new and has exceptional power as both a standalone 
and Internet programming language, though still tricky), definitely Perl 
(Everything COBOL can do is maybe about five percent of what Perl can do. 
Database programming becomes extremely easy with Perl, and it is 
comparatively easier to learn than C++ or Java), and perhaps Visual Basic 
(which I don’t really use). With any two of those four languages you’re 
not going to be out of work for long…

As for how to adjust a COBOL program on the Macintosh, I suspect it's 
probably a question of adjusting names for readable/writeable media (file 
systems are addressed quite a bit differently on a Mac than an IBM, and 
it'd be the same if you were trying a UNIX/LINUX-based program). Again, 
check the website above or communicate with them and they can give you 
more details for your specific COBOL compiler (pcobol?).

use “Disclaimer::Standard”;

Hope this helps!
Steve Laybourn