iSeries/AS/400 > Application Development > COBOL

Our customers are interested in supporting their COBOL based critical business applications because they know that COBOL possesses excellent self-documenting capabilities, good file handling methods, and exceptionally good data typing. Many COBOL programs are still in use in major commercial enterprises today. The expense of rewriting a very large code base that has already been debugged in a new language has not been thought to be worth any benefits that may ensue.

Our COBOL programmers have continued to increase their knowledge of the recent COBOL enhancements. Through our experience, an increasing numbers of our customers desire to upgrade their old or build their new applications in ILE. They have discovered that the time issue of repetitive programming in COBOL 400 in numerous places is tedious but necessary. ILE is a technique for the modular development of applications, the main benefit being the ability to efficiently reuse code.