COBOL

Funnily enough, the same people who objected to the English in COBOL objected to the baroque elegance of APL where all the English was replaced with numerical symbols, so one might conclude they just liked the status quo. Mercifully, the COBOL wars died out when the people who hated it turned out to hate ALGOL 68 even more."The question is, why is Cobol still in widespread use? The answer is, it does the job, it was conceived for business. Cobol is built around the concept of moving things around in storage. Most languages are built around a lower abstraction level and are more focused on algorithms. "
Another important effect that should result from the use of common languages is a lessening of duplication of effort. With the availability of scientific algorithms and of effective solutions to various business problems in convenient, understandable, and usable languages, it should no longer be necessary for every installation to resolve the same problems. This should permit a more rapid advancement, not only in the programming area, but in many of the fields that make use of computers.
. However the enormous success of the language in the face of dismissal by hackers and academics suggests they may be missing something. When the facts and the theory collide, sometimes the theory needs to be examined anew. Here are some reasons for writing a free COBOL compiler: There is no complete free COBOL compiler.Because of the good features of COBOL described above. To allow mainframe code to be ported to and from GNU/Linux easily. COBOL and assembler are the only languages that run well on IBM mainframes. To allow me to fix some of the problems with COBOL via extensions. This was my idea anyway. The size of COBOL means it will be a big achievement just to get the standard function going.