I've been lucky enough to do an internship in banking, where Cobol is (and I guess will be for the foreseable future) the core language.
I didn't have to write lots of Cobol, but it's been very educational: both its very rigorous syntax (and number handling as you said!) and the fact that the code I was modifying had been written even before I was born.
"If it ain't broke, don't fix it"
Cobol in itself is not a bad language at all! Mainframes are obviously rock solid and for development purposes, open source implementations of MVS exist (and were already useful 15 years ago, such as Hercules[1])
Comments
I've been lucky enough to do an internship in banking, where Cobol is (and I guess will be for the foreseable future) the core language.
I didn't have to write lots of Cobol, but it's been very educational: both its very rigorous syntax (and number handling as you said!) and the fact that the code I was modifying had been written even before I was born.
"If it ain't broke, don't fix it"
Cobol in itself is not a bad language at all! Mainframes are obviously rock solid and for development purposes, open source implementations of MVS exist (and were already useful 15 years ago, such as Hercules[1])
[1]http://www.hercules-390.org/