NYC*BUG Nov 2025: The Once and Future COBOL, James Lowden

Описание: The Once and Future COBOL, by James Lowden 2025-11-05

GCC 15, released in April 2025, for the first time includes COBOL among the languages it compiles. Alongside the venerable gcc and g++, there is now gcobol.

The reader may well wonder why a small company would devote years of development to produce a product they don't own and can't sell. Why did GCC decide to include COBOL? In short, what use is COBOL?

To those questions and more, we have answers.

As Mark Twain said of himself, news of COBOL's demise is much exaggerated. Industry studies show billions of lines of COBOL still in production. With a probability of 95%, your last ATM transaction went through a COBOL application. Not for nothing did nearly every large firm pull out the stops 25 years ago for Y2K to adapt their critical software to the 21st century. They didn't do that to throw it all away.

COBOL was and remains useful because it was specifically designed for its problem domain. No language is better suited for nuts-and-bolts unglamorous data processing. For example, COBOL defines an I/O model, numerical precision, 8 forms of rounding, and over 100 runtime exceptions.

Programming languages often have shallow, undeserved reputations. Lisp has too many parentheses, COBOL too many words, Perl is write-only. Let's talk about why COBOL remains viable and vital, and why it's now part of GCC.

James lives in Maine, where he tries to work 11 months a year, reserving August for sailing with his wife and their dog. He worked for many years on Wall Street on quantitative research systems. For a decade he was the maintainer for FreeTDS (www.freetds.org), a client library for SQL Server. Due in part to his efforts, this year GCC 15 added COBOL to the suite of languages it compiles.