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The Once and Future COBOL, James Lowden
2025-11-05 @ 18:45 local (23:45 UTC) - NYU Tandon Engineering Building
(new), 370 Jay St, 7th Floor kitchen area, Brooklyn
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.
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