Conclusion

When I mentioned to a table full of Internet programmers that I had just finished writing three COBOL programs, I heard comments like “COBOL is evil,” and “I've never learned COBOL and I never will.” But the one true comment I didn't hear was “COBOL is here and it's not going away.” By writing small, carefully targeted import and export systems such as the one described in this chapter, you can harness all the power of more modern systems without giving up the safety and security of the time-proven legacy systems that are in place in a typical large enterprise.