Enterprise COBOL is both a liability and an asset. There's tangible value hidden in the code.

See https://github.com/slott56/looking-at-cobol

I've tweaked the presentation a little.

The essential ingredients in coping with COBOL are these:

• Use something like Stingray Reader to parse COBOL DDE's and process the data …

I need to rewrite Stingray Reader. This project handles a certain amount of file processing using a schema to assure the Logical Layout is understood. It handles several common Physical Formats:

• CSV files where the format is extended by the various dialects options.
• COBOL files in ASCII or EBCDIC.

The …

Here's a popular idea.

... a COBOL-to-X translator, where X is a more-modern programming language ...

This is a noble aspiration.

In principle -- down deep -- all programming can be reduced to an idealized Turing Machine.

This means that we *should* be able to locate all the state changes in a given spaghetti-bowl …

Why didn't COBOL evolve more successfully?

FORTRAN, OTOH, has survived precisely because it--and more importantly, related tools, esp compilers--has evolved to solve/overcome many (certainly not all!) of the sorts of pain-points you describe, while retaining the significant performance edge that (IMHO, ICBW) prevents challengers …

https://twitter.com/audreywatters/status/1246609613203505152

The tweet has since been deleted. Here's the old text

Read this: https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/born-with-curiosity-the-grace-hopper-documentary#home Consider donating to preserve history. Read this: http://www.i-programmer.info/news/82-heritage/7368-crowd-fund-film-about-grace-hopper.html Her legacy is often overshadowed by folks like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs.

Here's an interesting problem. Implement the split command for mainframe COBOL EBCDIC files with their BDW and RDW headers.

The conventional split can't handle COBOL EBCDIC files because they don't have sensible \n line breaks. Translating an EBCDIC file to ASCII is high-risk because COMP and COMP-3 fields will be …

• Some small improvements to the COBOL DDE parsing.
• A sensible demo program that shows how to read COBOL files.
• A complete rewrite to Python3.3.
• Support for more COBOL syntax.
• Support for Occurs Depending On
• Support for RECFM=F, RECFM=V and RECFM=VB …

See this article: "The COBOL Brain Drain" in ComputerWorld. This article is very, very well written and repeats a number of common fallacies.

The fallacies lead to expensive, labor-intensive in-house software development and maintenance. Either there's a lot of effort poking at the COBOL code. Or there's a lot of …

Years ago (6? 7?) I did some data profiling in Python.

This required reading COBOL files with Python code.

Superficially, this is not really very hard.

1. Python slice syntax will pick fields on of the record. For example: data[12:14].

#. Python codecs will convert from EBCDIC to Unicode without …