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> It's not as though I can do a COBOL side-project to learn... or can I? My first job out of college - around '94 or so - was working for an accounting softwar
by commandlinefan 4y ago
> It's not as though I can do a COBOL side-project to learn... or can I?
My first job out of college - around '94 or so - was working for an accounting software company that sold an accounting package written entirely in RM Cobol for DOS. The entire UI and the backend were all written in Cobol. Poking around a bit, it does look like GnuCobol (https://gnucobol.sourceforge.io/doc/gnucobol.html https://gnucobol.sourceforge.io/doc/gnucobol.html) allows for some screen I/O… so you could put something together on your own machine.
- JD1967 4y agoI'm a little older, but similar. My first professional job was in 1985, programming in Cobol on Unix systems, on an accounting package. MS-DOS and IBM PC's were just becoming important, and we did later port to DOS, then Windows. We used Acucobol, and yes, everything was in Cobol. Acucobol had the SCREEN SECTION and you could put up nice text UI forms on terminals. I did a lot of cool things with cursor-point-and-click menu systems, etc. Once ported to Windows, and Acucobol's GUI controls, you couldn't tell the difference between a VB6 program and our Cobol programs. All native Windows controls.