Re: Welcome to new users and a question.

Well,

In our case (Federal Government) we are not permitted to use a non
portable language eg.. RPG; Be that as it may, my personal choice is
COBOL for the following reasons:

1) Self documenting
2) easy to read
3) almost the same on any/every platform
4) There is an abundance of COBOL programmers

Now I will admit that #1 & #2 require a bit of work on the part of the
developer and that if the work is not done, COBOL is worse than (pick
the language you least like to look at).

As for #3, I believe that is is easier to remember the differences than
to remember the entire language, that comes about naturaly with use!

Number 4 of course requires that you work for a company the does not
believe that ones brain shuts off after age 30. :)

Bob Larkin wrote:
> 
> Welcome to all the new members of the list.
> 
> I have a question for all. How did you come to use COBOL on the AS/400?
> 
> In my case, we were developing a new application on a new System/38 and
> got to chose the language. Out of 70 programmers, I was the only one
> with RPG, and it was not on the IBM midrange. We asked around, and
> "everyone" said that RPG was the "native" language, ran faster, was
> better supported.
> 
> Being the doubter I am, we ran tests, comparing COBOL to RPG. To our
> surprise, COBOL executed just as quickly as RPG on the whole. Each
> language had an area where it was faster, but overall, they were very
> similar in speed. We then got some mainframe COBOL user's involved.
> After a little introduction to the System/38, and the way I/O was
> handled, they took to it like a duck in water.
> 
> We decided to go with COBOL. As development progressed, we were always
> pushing the envelope. IBM would have a new feature, we would probably
> use it. We ended up finding a few bugs, but IBM was always quick to
> correct them. In fact, we often got to deal directly with members of the
> COBOL development team. (This was in the mid 80's).
> 
> That's my story, what's yours?
> Bob
> 
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