Not to mention GOTO. If your one of the people who hyperventilates when you see a goto because you learned that it was considered harmful in programmer school then Cobol might not be for you. ;)
You might be surprised about the comments though - depending on the age of the codebase. Mainframes were rented back in the day, you paid by resources consumed, terminal time was precious, and mainframes were often turned off outside business hours.
Because of this a lot of the development actually happened between terminal sessions in flowcharts, pseudo code, documentation, and peer review before the programs were ever modified and run.
If you ever run across really old comp-sci books you’ll typically see them divided into three sections - first section was usually a guide to the author’s terminology and symbology, second part was usually a guide to flow charting and documentation (IBM had standardized forms for developers to use), and then the remainder of the book was the content with lots of explanations of how to work the datasets hugely larger then the memory available to you.
But as time passed and computer time became cheaper many of those formal development practices started to get lax.
You might be surprised about the comments though - depending on the age of the codebase. Mainframes were rented back in the day, you paid by resources consumed, terminal time was precious, and mainframes were often turned off outside business hours.
Because of this a lot of the development actually happened between terminal sessions in flowcharts, pseudo code, documentation, and peer review before the programs were ever modified and run.
If you ever run across really old comp-sci books you’ll typically see them divided into three sections - first section was usually a guide to the author’s terminology and symbology, second part was usually a guide to flow charting and documentation (IBM had standardized forms for developers to use), and then the remainder of the book was the content with lots of explanations of how to work the datasets hugely larger then the memory available to you.
But as time passed and computer time became cheaper many of those formal development practices started to get lax.