Unless things have changed lately, it's still very annoying to get your Gnu COBOL program interacting with the test of your system. Something as simple as readi

Unless things have changed lately, it's still very annoying to get your Gnu COBOL program interacting with the test of your system. Something as simple as reading a file is a lot harder than you'd expect. And opening a TCP connection requires you to use specialised API calls to call the C functions directly, and the syntax for that was pretty horrible. COBOL is designed for handling well formed input data, process them, and then return well formed output to the next step in the chain (on the mainframes this is coordinated by JCL but I'm not sure how you do it on Linux).