Re: Why is Cobol ignored in compiler textbooks?

Trevor Jenkins <tfj@cix.compulink.co.uk> writes:


      [... why are there no books covering COBOL well ...]


and then the moderator adds:


      [It's true, far too many people dismiss Cobol with a not terribly well
      informed "ugh." It's certainly verbose, but there are things that it does
      well. -John]


More importantly, perhaps, a good chunk of the code out there in the world
is in COBOL (several billion lines of the stuff, last estimate I saw),
it's not going away soon (best guesses are that most of it will still be
running in 2010, assuming that it doesn't break when the date changes),
and so we need to compile it, and to do so better than before and for new
architectures.


The fact that it's a lousy language to program in shouldn't affect us one
way or the other (we don't have to write the compilers in it, after all).
FORTRAN is too (and, I can't resist adding, so is C).


But (embarrassed) if it's all the same to you, I'll stick to compiling
SML. :-)


Nick Haines nickh@cs.cmu.edu
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