[Info-vax] Any stronger versions of the LMF planned ?, was: Re: LMF Licence Generator Code

[abrsvc]

On Thursday, August 19, 2021 at 6:33:11 PM UTC-4, Lawrence D’Oliveiro wrote:
> On Thursday, August 19, 2021 at 6:49:24 AM UTC+12, Arne Vajhøj wrote: 
> 
> > The COBOL code is more lines. For one reason: everything need to be 
> > declared with a type. You may not like that, but I think that the 
> > COBOL programmers like that.
> And it’s worse than that. COBOL’s fixed-length strings open up a whole new potential avenue of vulnerabilities, in the form of buffer-overflow attacks. 
> 
> Another thing Fred Brooks said had to do with software systems that became so large and so complex that attempts to fix bugs would only introduce new ones. You managed to reach that point in just about a dozen lines of COBOL.

You seem to have something against Cobol for some reason.  There are limitations to all languages.  When used in the right environment, each language has its strengths.
Cobol by its very nature tends to be somewhat self documenting.  This can be a pain as it often requires more typing, but that is a one time thing.  Maintaining Cobol is probably the easiest when compared to many other languages most notably when comments are lacking.

Is Cobol the right language for all business applications, NO!  Is it good for financial applications, YES.  These tend to be batch oriented in many cases and this is where Cobol shines.  Even with database access, Cobol applications are common backends for other language based front-ends.   Even the recent issues in the states with the "lack" of Cobol programmers, it turns out that the majority of the issues were NOT with the backend processing but with the web facing interfaces.

Dan