Good stuff freeOn.

The thing about COBOL which I find very good is that it is excellent in handling files. (Mind you, I've only been doing it for a month or two - so I'm talking about simple text files). I got this opinion, cos I also know java and when working with files in java, you have to code so much to prevent the program from crashing. You have to catch exceptions here and there and it is much more messy. With COBOL, it basically takes care of almost everything. The only thing you have to check for is EOF (End-of-File), which is very very easy to do.

example (snippet of code):

READ RECORD-FILE
AT END MOVE 'YES' TO EOF
END-READ

And that's it. Very simple.

Greg