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Good Luck. Here's your first one ![Java | [Coffee]](https://codeproject.global.ssl.fastly.net/script/Forums/Images/coffee.gif)
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Forogar wrote: However, yesterday, since my boss happened to know I had once, long ago, worked on mainframes using, amongst other things, the dreaded COBOL, ... no useful documentation
ummm, wasn't the verbosity of COBOL meant to be the 'documentation' in itself? 
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Says the person who has never tried to figure it out...
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Well way back in uni I remember that's what they told us - the intent of COBOL was "the non programmer could read the code and understand what it was doing because it was almost like English sentences.
but yeah I know - that's why I added the LOL
but I do remember often the documentation (if any) was a lot shorter then the source code, i.e. one sentance say "calculate, round, and add interest and print as a line on the statement" = about 10 lines of code (20 lines for a junior).
(Then again I've seen people manage even more lines for doing similar things in say c#, and let's not talk about vb)
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Just get Cobol.Net and then you can throw it under the visual studio debugger.
".45 ACP - because shooting twice is just silly" - JSOP, 2010
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You can never have too much ammo - unless you're swimming, or on fire. - JSOP, 2010
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When you pry the gun from my cold dead hands, be careful - the barrel will be very hot. - JSOP, 2013
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John Simmons / outlaw programmer wrote: Just get Cobol.Net and then you can throw it under the visual studio debugger bus .
FTFY.
Sent from my Amstrad PC 1640
Never throw anything away, Griff
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay...
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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OriginalGriff wrote: Just get Cobol.Net and then you can throw it under the visual studio debugger S-100 bus .
FTFY2.
Software Zen: delete this;
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Forogar wrote: Many of these programs had been first written in 1991
I was a COBOL and CICS programmer at Norwich Union back in 1991 in the sandwich year of my information systems degree so you have my sympathy.
“That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.”
― Christopher Hitchens
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Coffee? Try drain o and let them abuse someone else instead.
....And the living will envy the dead.
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Ron Anders wrote: And the living will envy the dead.
Cue Tina[^].
Software Zen: delete this;
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Still got a green bar tractor feed printer? Print it out and used color pencils to map out what's going on.
What? Use the appropriate tool for the job. 
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Honestly ? That job looks cool af.
Says the geek in me.
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outsource it to someone in India for 1/4 what you make and have them do all the heavy grunt work. Just a thought.
To err is human to really mess up you need a computer
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Unfortunately there is a security level on the data which prevents that. In addition, I refuse to get up at 4am to manage the work. I have done that in the past and it gets old very quickly!
In addition to that, and this is only my own experience from only two projects, it took much more time to correct the introduced errors in the code than if we had just written it ourselves in the first place!
- I would love to change the world, but they won’t give me the source code.
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that is a good point. I am very lucky, the two times I have worked with people from India the code has been quite good and the time change doesn't bother me that much.
But I get what you are saying and also proprietary systems and all.
Good luck.
To err is human to really mess up you need a computer
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After this week I would kill for a good, long COBOL job...
"The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge". Stephen Hawking, 1942- 2018
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Kornfeld Eliyahu Peter wrote: After this week I would kill for a good, long COBOL job...
Sounds almost pornographic.
".45 ACP - because shooting twice is just silly" - JSOP, 2010
-----
You can never have too much ammo - unless you're swimming, or on fire. - JSOP, 2010
-----
When you pry the gun from my cold dead hands, be careful - the barrel will be very hot. - JSOP, 2013
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I can not fix your mind 
Probably no one can...
"The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge". Stephen Hawking, 1942- 2018
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Quote: Probably no one can...
Probably no one would want to!
- I would love to change the world, but they won’t give me the source code.
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One dirty solution: does any one know the correct output for a given input? if yes, you can instead make a complete new one base on the pattern their descripted, if no, then it is even more simpler, just do a good old new Random().Next(xxx), it`s not like anyone can tell the different. 
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Doesn't the GCC suite have a COBOL compiler? If you parse the code into a DAG structure (before being processed by the compiler back end), you could reassemble the DAG into another language, such as C++.
I guess you would want to turn off all sorts of optimization, or you could intercept the compiler after parsing, but before any global optimization. (If you let an optimizer move code around, merge identical subexpressions into one etc. etc., the program logic may be far more difficult to grasp.) Maybe you could even preserve more of the symbolic information by intercepting the process as early as possible, without having to analyze debug information.
Disclaimer: I have never been into the core of the GCC compilers, so I have never tried to do anything like this myself. If you are a compiler guy, and you are talking about a code base of a million lines, you may consider it. If you don't know much about compilers, forget it.
I did one project machine translating one language into another, and concluded that the cleanup work of the generated code cost us far more than manual hand translation would have amounted to. But the translator we used worked at the source code level, breaking textual statements down into textual fragments and reassembling it from different textual fragments. If you do a complete syntactical and semantic parsing, you probably have a much higher chance of getting a workable result. But it takes a compiler guy, and I would think that the initial effort won't pay back for anything less than a million line of code.
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Is rank and file a manicurist with a body odour problem?
Sent from my Amstrad PC 1640
Never throw anything away, Griff
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay...
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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And.. is EOF a retired one?
"If we don't change direction, we'll end up where we're going"
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not being sexist but why do manicurists mostly serve females?
in fact never seen a womanicurist? where's the equal rites in that?
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