The Kasten COBOL Page

2009-12-01T12:18:00.000-08:00

By Michael C. Kasten

From one of the dinosaurs who still writes COBOL - the language which is on the brink of extinction, and always will be - welcome to my COBOL page.

Despite what you may have heard, this old fossil of a language can survive, thrive, and even coexist with those hairy little mammals who have been acting so smug and uppity.
Coding Guidelines

The COBOL Style Forum suggests ways to make your COBOL readable, well-structured, and bug-resistant. Not everyone will agree with me; I hope others will contribute their points of view.

Object Oriented COBOL
Here's what I've learned so far about IBM's implementation of object-oriented COBOL.

Guerrilla COBOL
Do you suffer from C-envy? Would you like to try some of the tricks that are so common in C and other languages? You can. With a reasonably modern dialect of COBOL, and a little ingenuity, you can do almost anything that a C programmer can do:

Dynamic Memory Allocation
Pointer Variables
Global Variables
Environmental Variables
Data Structures
Text Parsing Techniques
Finite State Machines

COBOL Programming Ebooks

The Kasten COBOL Page