Cobol Still Powers the Global Economy
One of my last jobs as an intern in 2004 was to rewrite an old batch process COBOL app in C# and ASP.Net. App was basically input about 6 fields, and based up some rules.  It really wasn't terribly complicated, but I had to read the source to understand exactly what it did.  It was also my real exposure to COBOL.  Took me a while to realize that around 60 printed pages of the 80ish page program was nothing but hard coded data tables and rules, when this, then that, etc.  Once I realized that, it was a few simple regexs to pull that  and transform to xml (was early 2000s...).<p>While decyphering the remaining logic, I discovered what I think is the most evil programming construct I've so far seen; think goto is bad? Meet MOVE NEXT SENTENCE. COBOL is traditionally written in all uppercase (and historically EBCIDIC). So what does "MOVE NEXT SENTENCE" do? It's an unconditional jump to the next period, that's right '.'. Thats right, in a language where everything looks like it's yelling at you, you have to find a little tiny period to find where execution resumes. No labels, just a tiny couple of pixel round period. Fun...