I've never written any COBOL, but I have debugged COBOL and determined the source of errors by reading it. My overall impression is that it's verbose (obviousl

I've never written any COBOL, but I have debugged COBOL and determined the source of errors by reading it. My overall impression is that it's verbose (obviously), but it's also fairly straight-forward and easy to read even if you don't know COBOL. The most interesting part of it, for me anyway, are the 88-level declarations[0]. Basically it's like a logic test encapsulated in a variable. You can say something like "IF STAFF-MEMBER" where STAFF-MEMBER actually means that some field has a certain value. It makes it easy to understand in some respects, but also adds a layer of obfuscation. [0] http://www.mainframestechhelp.com/tutorials/cobol/cobol-88-level-number.htm http://www.mainframestechhelp.com/tutorials/cobol/cobol-88-l...