4 ms·
It is much harder to modify old software than it is to modify an old building. I've seen projects to modify some small aspect of our system that took 10+ develo
by drabiega 10y ago
It is much harder to modify old software than it is to modify an old building. I've seen projects to modify some small aspect of our system that took 10+ developers six months to implement, but could have been done in an afternoon by a single dev with an IDE, had the project been written in a statically typed language.
- prirun 10y agoCOBOL is statically typed. In fact, one of the good features about COBOL is that all fields (variables) have exactly specified lengths, including numbers. You don't just say "I want an integer", you have to say exactly how many digits are in the integer, assuming you use PIC fields (decimal) instead of COMP (binary). Non-numeric fields have exact sizes too, like X(20). It is impossible to have a buffer overflow in COBOL.
- drabiega 10y agoA given COBOL module is statically typed, but a typical (in my experience) COBOL application is made up of many modules and there is no type checking between them.