RE: COBOL ILE - what future does it have?

["Weatherly, Howard" <hweatherly@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

There is almost nothing that you can not do in Cobol! You might need to use some external HLL or VLL call to accomplish time sensitive things or things that you choose to get done fast and do not wish to spend the time to figure out in Cobol. As for you main question, As long as there are programs that need to be maintained and business that are conscious of the safety that Cobol provides given the sheer number of programmers, Cobol will hang around. The time to be concerned is when ANSI and CODASYL quit advancing the language, then it will go the way of "Viva Latina Lingua". 

-----Original Message-----
From: geir.kildal@entragroup.com [mailto:geir.kildal@entragroup.com]
Sent: Friday, June 29, 2001 09:20
To: COBOL400-L@midrange.com
Subject: COBOL ILE - what future does it have?

Hello.

While I have started working with ILE-COBOL, I have been thinking about this old laguage, which has been doomed to death for the last twenty years, but is still working, and beeing developed.  Today it has become OO-like, but what will happend in the future?  How long will COBOL be a useful language, and will it ever be able to do some of the things Java can do today?(Internet, client/server etc)

Can some Guru share some visions about COBOL?

Mvh.

Geir Kildal