Hey guys. I have a question. Some day I would really like to be a games programmer but in the mean time I am just taking Computer science. However it seems that almost all my coursework is going to be COBOL. I honestly don''t know much about it but from what I hear it is not a very well liked language. So what do you guys think of COBOL and why?

I hate it.

I went to a programming school for 5 years, out of which one was taken by COBOL.

It''s an old, unwieldy, monolithic monster. We programmed in it from some dumb, 2 color (orange and black) terminals on a stone aged Siemens C40 mainframe. yuck.

The only thing nice to say about COBOL is about its data handling. Defining completely free data types (like "I want a sign here, then 4 decimal numbers, one comma, and then at least 2 decimal numbers, but at most 5") is a breeze.

Still, many banks, hotels etc.... use COBOL systems today, mostly because they cannot afford to get rid of the monstrous Siemens and IBM systems they have lying around, and they cannot get someone to program a replacement for their COBOL programs.

Schools like to pick COBOL as their starting language, because it is simple to do simple things in COBOL (defining input masks, gathering the data, processing it and putting it somewhere).

Hope this helped.

Ciao, ¡muh!

ENVIRONMENT-DIVISION.
PIC X.
PIC 999.

Arrggh. - yup., I. had. very. similar. experiences. to. thebigMuh. when. I. was. at. college.

Although its not directly a language you''re ever going to use programming games, I do think that it is useful to have used older languages, one thing it''ll make ou appreciate is realtime debugging and the flexibility you have in say C.
Its also a useful learning experience, because the language won''t let you do very much and has an extremely strict syntax, this means you spend less time deciding how to write a function and more time looking at overall data and program structure (something people don''t do enough of with C/C++ etc)

--
Simon O''''Connor
Creative Asylum Ltd
www.creative-asylum.com

Well, it could be worse. You could be using PROLOG!

I''m anti-COBOL as well, though I''ve never written in it. One sour former coworker of mine loved COBOL and was always pining about "back in the days of Barney..." (Barney was an old, long-dead server. Perhaps the name had something to do with that...)

Anyway, the point of a CS education is to learn to program. Pick up a C++ compiler and some C++ books, and learn everything you can about them on your own. Use the classes on COBOL to learn some of the conceptual stuff as well.

Luck!

Adiss
a.k.a. Magic Card