As previously reported (CI No 1,410), the Cobol consultant Jerome Garfunkel has joined Micro Focus Plc as a Cobol evangelist. He has been involved with the language for 18 years, loves it and wants to keep it popular and up to date. Consequently, he says he was delighted to be offered a position and title at Micro Focus. He believes that with the move to programming on the personal computer Micro Focus is definitely the right Cobol company to join and he claims that he has always been an advocate for Micro Focus right from the early days when it was unfashionable upstart. His enthusiasm for Cobol is unbounded as he points out that Cobol is a very readable language and is good for writing a system that needs to be maintained. As for C, well, it may offer better program performance but it is a nitty-gritty language and requires a technical background, whereas the beauty of Cobol is that it is a business language designed to be verbose so that it is readable. Garfunkel believes that part of the problem with Cobol is that it has never really found academic favour because of an anti-business bias in educational institutions. But some of the criticisms levelled at Cobol are outdated according to Garfunkel. For Example Cobol ’85 is a far more structured language than early versions of Cobol and has absorbed suggestions from both Ed Yourdan and Michael Jackson. Garfunkel is used to having to defend Cobol, for it is a language that has been on the defensive since its inception in 1959. At that time Charlie Phillips sent a tombstone from the Codasyl Committee to the US Department of Defense, asking for it to be buried. As the years roll by the language and its supporters have greeted news of its death with increasing equanimity. After all, it is the most popular business programming language in the world. Garfunkel reckons that about 75% of all application programs are written in Cobol and that there are between 70 and 80 billion lines of Cobol in existence in the world today most of which were written in the last decade. He estimates that Cobol has a trillion dollar market and that there are still programmers to be tapped into that aren’t cryptic souls and that want long-lived maintainable code which fourth generation languages can’t provide. As for the future of Cobol, Garfunkel is concerned that it must keep up with new technologies. To this end Codasyl, the Cobol standards body, has a task group working on object-oriented techniques.

Cobol Object-Oriented Language

The problem is that Cobol and object-oriented programming are two completely different paradigms. Nevertheless, Codasyl has begun to define the object-oriented concepts to put into Cobol. Garfunkel hastens to add that many of these concepts already exist in the language so it won’t be a case of retro-fitting, although some retro-fitting will be required. The current debate is whether toretrofit these concepts totally or to add a layer of new syntax to Cobol and extend the language to meet the concepts half-way. However, it is a totally different way of programming and there will be no natural progression to Cool (Cobol object-oriented language) from Cobol. Nor will applications written in the two different languages be interoperable, but the new language will offer Cobol programmers an easy path into object-oriented techniques. Garfunkel says he expects an object-oriented compiler to appear from Micro Focus some time before there is an ANSI standard on the issue. Meanwhile Garfunkel is agitating for a standard Cobol debugger and deplores the amount of vendor in-fighting that goes on within the Cobol community. As for his position with Micro Focus he warns that he is a Cobol evangelist not a Micro Focus flunkey and that while he is pleased to be able to tap into the Micro Focus network, he will, as ever, be taking the side of the Cobol user. – Katy Ring