COBOL IS SATAN, i did 7 weeks of that last year and I HATED IT, but i must say, if i had to sit down and code a COBOL program right now, i could probably do it.. which is more than i could say for C++. COBOL is a very well structured language and good for handling mass quantities of raw data, but I would definitely suggest C++. WAY more applicable to modern programming, all a year of COBOL will get you is a job debugging, writting, maintaining, or converting COBOL and that is my idea of the fifth ring of hell!