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Node.js Now Runs COBOL and FORTRAN (arstechnica.com)

Posted by EditorDavid on from the party-like-it's-1959 dept.

Last summer a developer created a plugin which made it possible to run snippets of COBOL code embedded in JavaScript using the Node.js interpreter. Now Slashdot reader techfilz writes: Romanian developer Bizau Ionica has engineered a software bridge called node.cobol which can execute Node.js scripts from within COBOL programs.
The link shows COBOL code executing a Node.js script that launches a Web server and creates ASCII art from a JPEG image -- in this case, Admiral Grace Hopper, who helped create COBOL in 1959. And Ars Technica points out the same developer has also built a Node.js bridge for FORTRAN.

14 of 86 comments (clear)

  1. Stop him - by any means necessary by Hognoxious · · Score: 5, Funny

    He needs to be stopped before he gets round to Visual Basic.

    --
    Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
  2. Bizau by campuscodi · · Score: 2

    No surprise Bizau did it. This guy has been making JavaScript do weird stuff for a long time. Just check out his GitHub repo.

  3. Worthless by 110010001000 · · Score: 4, Funny

    Until it runs ADA it will be a toy language for hipsters.

  4. Monuments of unageing intellect in code by sittingnut · · Score: 2

    ...
    Monuments of unageing intellect. ...
    Once out of nature I shall never take
    My bodily form from any natural thing,
    But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
    Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
    To keep a drowsy Emperor awake; ...

    from Sailing to Byzantium by William Butler Yeats

  5. They were so eager to see if they could... by Ngarrang · · Score: 4, Funny

    ...they never stopped to think if they should.

    Please, stop creating excuses to keep all that old FORTRAN and COBOL code around. Think of the children!

    --
    Bearded Dragon
    1. Re:They were so eager to see if they could... by Theovon · · Score: 2

      No, Javascript belongs in an entirely different bin. Javascript is an interpreted object-oriented language that makes functions a first-class datatype. The other languages were compiled, completely procedural, and at least Fortran didn’t even support recursion until the 90’s.

    2. Re:They were so eager to see if they could... by ooloorie · · Score: 5, Informative

      The other languages were compiled, completely procedural, and at least Fortran didn’t even support recursion until the 90’s.

      I'm not sure what you mean by "were". Fortran is widely used in scientific computing. It has supported recursion since the 1970's, although it only was standardized in 1990. Fortran 200x is object oriented, supports operator overloading, and has excellent support for array and parallel computing.

    3. Re:They were so eager to see if they could... by K.+S.+Kyosuke · · Score: 2

      It's also quite difficult to customize code on the fly with Fortran with any decent speed, whereas you can feed code transformed at run time into LuaJIT on the fly and end up with something that actually runs fast.

      --
      Ezekiel 23:20
  6. So I read both articles by rebelwarlock · · Score: 3, Insightful

    No one says why this was done. I'm beginning to suspect the people who did it don't know why either.

  7. Pfffft by JustAnotherOldGuy · · Score: 4, Funny

    I won't be happy until I can run COBOL in my browser under WINE through a VM running on a aliased instance of Win XP under AmigaOS.

    Oh, and I want a high frame rate too.

    --
    Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
  8. Finally by Opportunist · · Score: 4, Funny

    About time my malware runs on payroll mainframes!

    --
    We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
  9. Re: Visual Basic is an improvement over JavaScript by hackwrench · · Score: 2

    The original Visual BASIC was backward compatible for the most part with Quick BASIC. QB64, while not backward compatible with VB is also backward compatible with QB, with its own extensions.

  10. Re:Getting confused by edittard · · Score: 2

    The title give one way and the main text give the opposite.

    # Meet the new editor,
    Same as the old editor... /#

    --
    At the bottom of the /. main page it says 'Yesterday's News'. Well they got that right.
  11. Re:COBOL by ceoyoyo · · Score: 2

    Yeah right. Payroll NEVER makes any mistakes.