Legacy Code Adventures: A COBOL Odyssey
2025-05-22
Maintaining 200k lines of COBOL code unearthed a treasure trove of ingenious hacks and historical quirks. The author discovered base-10 numerics, clever string parsing using data definitions, and a 'REDEFINES' statement used for internationalization (even with Spanish redefinitions!). Early exits were implemented for abrupt job termination, and a file mysteriously contained the first 800 natural numbers as string constants. The story concludes with the revelation that the UNIX 'dd' command originates from COBOL's 'DD' statement for data definition, showcasing the unexpected legacy of mainframe programming.
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