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Re: Things have 'moved on' apparently

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On 11/7/2015 12:21 PM, Martin Gregorie wrote:
> On Fri, 06 Nov 2015 19:46:43 -0500, Jerry Stuckle wrote:
> 
>> COBOL is still the most commonly used language in the world, with an
>> estimated > 2B LOC created annually.  While it is not used for web
>> applications, it is used extensively in financial applications such as
>> government, banking and insurance.
>>
> Are there any estimates of how much of this is MicroFocus COBOL?  
> I'd have thought these may be a fair bit of this since of you'rew 
> ditching mainframes on favour of *NIX boxes, moving existing COBOL code 
> to MicroFocus is probably the least-effort port.
> 
> RM COBOL?
> 
> ...or is this only for mainframes?
>

I haven't seen a breakout by type.  But virtually every financial
institution, insurance company, U.S. governments (and a lot of foreign
ones) and more use COBOL.  Some of this is historical, but much has to
do with the handling of floating point numbers - decimal values can be
computed exactly to as many places as (reasonably) wanted.  No
float/double rounding errors.

For instance, it's not unusual to have a top limit of 999B, computed to
six or eight decimal places.  That's accuracy to 18 or 20 digits -
something you can't get with a 32 bit float.

>> And JCL is the most commonly used language on IBM-compatible mainframes,
>> used by most large companies in the world.
>>
> I've seen it and didn't understand it. I remember using SPFFY a very long 
> time ago and thought it easily the worst interactive environment I've 
> seen. Yes, much worse than VME/B SCL or OS/400 CL - which are 
> surprisingly similar in the way they work.
> 
> However there well may be more UNIX/Linux shell script out there than JCL. 
> Got any numbers on that?
>  
> 

No, I don't.  I just know that it's a huge conversion to go from an IBM
mainframe OS to Unix/Linux.  Since companies don't typically buy/lease
huge amounts of computing power, disk space, etc. than they need, to
switch they basically need to duplicate their existing hardware and
databases, then start recompiling source code (and recreating programs
whose source code may have been lost over the years - it happens!).
That plus the additional programmers to perform the conversion, often
taking two years or more, makes it a very expensive project.

As a result, there's still a lot of JCL out there, and more being
written every day.  Whether it exceeds shell scripts, I don't know.

-- 
==================
Remove the "x" from my email address
Jerry Stuckle
jstucklex@attglobal.net
==================

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Thread

Things have 'moved on' apparently Eternal Hope <laughingspam99@gmail.com> - 2015-11-06 12:32 +0000
  Re: Things have 'moved on' apparently Kevin McMurtrie <mcmurtrie@pixelmemory.us> - 2015-11-06 08:25 -0800
    Re: Things have 'moved on' apparently Eric Douglas <e.d.programmer@gmail.com> - 2015-11-06 12:02 -0800
      Re: Things have 'moved on' apparently Jerry Stuckle <jstucklex@attglobal.net> - 2015-11-06 19:46 -0500
        Re: Things have 'moved on' apparently Martin Gregorie <martin@address-in-sig.invalid> - 2015-11-07 17:21 +0000
          Re: Things have 'moved on' apparently Jerry Stuckle <jstucklex@attglobal.net> - 2015-11-07 12:50 -0500
        Re: Things have 'moved on' apparently Eric Douglas <e.d.programmer@gmail.com> - 2015-11-09 05:37 -0800
          Re: Things have 'moved on' apparently Jerry Stuckle <jstucklex@attglobal.net> - 2015-11-09 09:00 -0500
          Re: Things have 'moved on' apparently Martin Gregorie <martin@address-in-sig.invalid> - 2015-11-09 14:56 +0000
          Re: Things have 'moved on' apparently Martin Gregorie <martin@address-in-sig.invalid> - 2015-11-09 19:25 +0000
      Re: Things have 'moved on' apparently Arne Vajhøj <arne@vajhoej.dk> - 2015-11-07 21:57 -0500
    Re: Things have 'moved on' apparently Arne Vajhøj <arne@vajhoej.dk> - 2015-11-07 22:02 -0500
      Re: Things have 'moved on' apparently leif.roar@dimnakorr.com - 2015-11-08 02:00 -0600
        Re: Things have 'moved on' apparently Arne Vajhøj <arne@vajhoej.dk> - 2015-11-08 08:44 -0500
          Re: Things have 'moved on' apparently leif.roar@dimnakorr.com - 2015-11-08 13:08 -0600
        Re: Things have 'moved on' apparently Robert Klemme <shortcutter@googlemail.com> - 2015-11-08 18:54 +0100
          Re: Things have 'moved on' apparently Martin Gregorie <martin@address-in-sig.invalid> - 2015-11-08 21:12 +0000
            Re: Things have 'moved on' apparently Arne Vajhøj <arne@vajhoej.dk> - 2015-11-08 17:05 -0500
              Re: Things have 'moved on' apparently Martin Gregorie <martin@address-in-sig.invalid> - 2015-11-08 23:24 +0000
                Re: Things have 'moved on' apparently Arne Vajhøj <arne@vajhoej.dk> - 2015-11-08 19:40 -0500
                Re: Things have 'moved on' apparently Jerry Stuckle <jstucklex@attglobal.net> - 2015-11-08 21:32 -0500
                Re: Things have 'moved on' apparently Martin Gregorie <martin@address-in-sig.invalid> - 2015-11-09 15:15 +0000
      Re: Things have 'moved on' apparently Kevin McMurtrie <mcmurtrie@pixelmemory.us> - 2015-11-08 12:10 -0800
        Re: Things have 'moved on' apparently Jerry Stuckle <jstucklex@attglobal.net> - 2015-11-08 16:00 -0500
        Re: Things have 'moved on' apparently Arne Vajhøj <arne@vajhoej.dk> - 2015-11-08 16:51 -0500
  Re: Things have 'moved on' apparently Jan Burse <janburse@fastmail.fm> - 2015-11-08 00:55 +0100
  Re: Things have 'moved on' apparently Arne Vajhøj <arne@vajhoej.dk> - 2015-11-07 21:28 -0500
    Re: Things have 'moved on' apparently Arne Vajhøj <arne@vajhoej.dk> - 2015-11-07 21:36 -0500
  Re: Things have 'moved on' apparently leif.roar@dimnakorr.com - 2015-11-08 02:12 -0600
  Re: Things have 'moved on' apparently askfor <askfor@nowhere.net> - 2015-11-09 18:02 +0100
  Re: Things have 'moved on' apparently Kevin McMurtrie <mcmurtrie@pixelmemory.us> - 2015-11-10 22:32 -0800
    Re: Things have 'moved on' apparently Eternal Hope <laughingspam99@gmail.com> - 2015-11-11 07:52 +0000
      Re: Things have 'moved on' apparently ross.finlayson@gmail.com - 2015-11-19 23:28 -0800

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