Xref: utzoo comp.lang.c:10796 comp.unix.questions:7661 Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!portal!cup.portal.com!Chuck_M_Grandgent From: Chuck_M_Grandgent@cup.portal.com Newsgroups: comp.lang.c,comp.unix.questions Subject: Re: C/IBM Message-ID: <6585@cup.portal.com> Date: 17 Jun 88 01:39:25 GMT References: <10565@agate.BERKELEY.EDU> <768@altger.UUCP> Organization: The Portal System (TM) Lines: 15 XPortal-User-Id: 1.1001.3636 Having been a manager presiding over a group of software development folk used to COBOL for years, who were somewhat suddently thrown onto a UNIX-based development platform, I'd like to throw my two cents in. My first exposure to COBOL was 12 years ago in college. I hated COBOL so much I flunked it the first time. However over many years I grew to appreciate its strengths in several areas: 1) excellent file handling capabilities, unmatched by any other language I've encountered 2) excellent self-documenting characteristics due to its English-like verbosity. On a System-V platform, we went for Microfocus COBOL, which I would recommend. What we DID do, was to port a couple MSDOS "C" libraries to UNIX and then call them from the COBOL. This was seen to be a nice situation. The libraries did handy data and date/time conversion stuff, and would've been a pain in COBOL. The consensus grew to be that a nice combination of "C" and COBOL got along real well together.