Have not dealt too much with COBOL but learnt it a while ago. It was one of the easier languages to comprehend quickly. I thought it was well suited for input and data processing focused applications.
I do remember thinking it's odd that a line has exactly 80 characters and putting an asterisk in the 7th or 8th row means the line is a comment.
This is probably not true these days with modern COBOL. But when I saw Python the first time, and that it enforces similar restrictions with intendation and then Golang following suite, I had to smile that such old concepts of enforcing style still are seen as useful today.
Often we just have to go back and see what others have done decades ago to get new ideas!
I do remember thinking it's odd that a line has exactly 80 characters and putting an asterisk in the 7th or 8th row means the line is a comment.
This is probably not true these days with modern COBOL. But when I saw Python the first time, and that it enforces similar restrictions with intendation and then Golang following suite, I had to smile that such old concepts of enforcing style still are seen as useful today.
Often we just have to go back and see what others have done decades ago to get new ideas!