C/IBM

[Chuck_M_Grandgent at cup.portal.com]

Having been a manager presiding over a group of software development
folk used to COBOL for years, who were somewhat suddently thrown onto
a UNIX-based development platform, I'd like to throw my two cents in.
My first exposure to COBOL was 12 years ago in college. I hated COBOL
so much I flunked it the first time.  However over many years I grew
to appreciate its strengths in several areas: 1) excellent file handling
capabilities, unmatched by any other language I've encountered
2) excellent self-documenting characteristics due to its English-like
verbosity.  On a System-V platform, we went for Microfocus COBOL, which
I would recommend.  What we DID do, was to port a couple MSDOS "C"
libraries to UNIX and then call them from the COBOL.  This was seen
to be a nice situation.  The libraries did handy data and date/time
conversion stuff, and would've been a pain in COBOL.  The consensus
grew to be that a nice combination of "C" and COBOL got along real
well together.