OK, just so you know....I love the Language of COBOL. I love it's elegant simplicity, it's format and it's structure. I love EVALUATE and PERFORM and INSPECT. I love pretty code all lined up. I love the solid Courier TYPEFACE in my TSO EDIT page. I love substrings and SEARCH and EXEC SQL. I love paragraphs with single functions and one simple period at the end of the paragraph. EXIT.
I have been coding programs in COBOL since 1994 and I still do today every chance I get.
I realize this makes me a nerd. I also realize this dates me with all other modern IT nerds who prefer JAVA and PERL and C++ and all the other 'inferior' languages. I am ok with that.
There is something so basic and primal about beautifly structured COBOL. When all the code is lined up, where every sentence in the program is well thought out, where every error and exception is handled efficiently. I love to see CODE that is KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid) validated and pleasing to the eye and every function is balanced...no more code and no less code then is efficient to perform the objective of the program. I admire IF statements with no nasty NOT, everything positively stated and structured.
The beauty of a well designed array is beyond lovely. Well thought out variable names are as beautiful as perfectly rhymed and metered poetry.
I love to see my name in the flowerbox of a well designed COBOL program. It is lasting and eternal. I will be long gone from this mortal coil and some elegant COBOL module that I created will still be executing on some box somewhere. I just know it will.
PERFORM UNTIL
Cheers, nca.
