Not to worry. Five minutes with my old Advanced COBOL book, and I decided that I really don’t want to get involved with COBOL again. Not that I have anything against the language, per se, but I’d rather work with a more modern tool. I’ve come to like strong typing, objects, and local variables. I know that the COBOL 85 standard and the new proposed standard add some of that (mostly support for nested programs, including local variables), but the language just isn’t suited for the kind of work that interests me these days. If I was writing business applications again, then maybe. I’ve yet to find a language more suited for the banking industry than COBOL, but COBOL doesn’t handle GUI applications, parsing, or web transactions very well. I think I can find something more interesting and challenging than writing a compiler for a 40-year-old computer language that I hope never to use again.