Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!cs.utexas.edu!wuarchive!texbell!bellcore!dduck!duncan
From: duncan@dduck.ctt.bellcore.com (Scott Duncan)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc
Subject: Re: CALL FOR DISCUSSION: comp.lang.cobo
Message-ID: <18409@bellcore.bellcore.com>
Date: 30 Nov 89 14:25:42 GMT
References: <480@enea.se> <117400004@uxa.cso.uiuc.edu>
Sender: news@bellcore.bellcore.com
Reply-To: duncan@ctt.bellcore.com (Scott Duncan)
Organization: Bellcore, Piscataway, NJ
Lines: 32

In article <117400004@uxa.cso.uiuc.edu> smk90219@uxa.cso.uiuc.edu writes:
>
>Are you sure cobol isn't dead?  I thought it had been replaced by, say,
>
>Natural/Adabas, Modula, C++, etc.
>
>At least here in the U.S.
>
>		--  Just Wondering

As far as the commercial data processing community goes COBOL is more than
alive in the US.  There is probably more COBOL code still in production than
anything else.  Vendors continue to produce tools to support COBOL development,
e.g., most CASE tools seem either to be exclusively COBOL oriented or mainly
so.

In more engineering and scientific markets FORTRAN and C seem very healthy
with Ada making respectable advances.

Commercial organization are definitely looking at altrernatives to COBOL as
they get more involved in non-traditional business applications (communica-
tions, networking, real-time).  But COBOL is not going away and will remain
common if companies go more towards code generation technology since COBOL is
what many vendors offer today.  (Even if the code generation issue may make
it irrelevant what's being generated underneath.  I say "may" because, even
though it should, we are at the assembly language vs high-level language phase
in arguments about performance/efficiency of such code.)

Speaking only for myself, of course, I am...
Scott P. Duncan (duncan@ctt.bellcore.com OR ...!bellcore!ctt!duncan)
                (Bellcore, 444 Hoes Lane  RRC 1H-210, Piscataway, NJ  08854)
                (201-699-3910 (w)   609-737-2945 (h))