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when I shared this on reddit someone said something along the lines: in one hand this is cool but on the other hand I just wish Cobol would just die
by atum47 6y ago
when I shared this on reddit someone said something along the lines: in one hand this is cool but on the other hand I just wish Cobol would just die
- wruza 6y agoCOBOL seems to be very translatable to any modern language, e.g. Pascal or BASIC. Real world reasons against "why not just translate it then" are understandable, but at some point that could become economical.
- atum47 6y agoyeah, I wrote a neural network a while back to run both in front and back end. to the front end I used JavaScript and for the back python. apart from matrix multiplications (python I used numpy, JavaScript I wrote my own class) the code is almost identical. that got me wondering that I could write a program to translate a language to another. a large company could commission a (bunch of) programmer(s) to do this
- shakna 6y agoCOBOL's numeric stack doesn't directly translate to many modern languages, which makes the translation introduce all sorts of fun edge cases that are extremely difficult to track down. IEEE 754, which most of our modern languages are mostly compatible with, came about in '87. Long after COBOL had standardised itself on how numbers were expected to behave.
- pjmlp 6y agoBeside AOT compilation to native code, Fujistsu and Micro Focus have Cobol compilers with .NET and Java backends, and I wouldn't be surprised if they eventually come up with WebAssembly support as well. Also don't forget that languages like C and UNIX are just 10 years younger than COBOL.