I implemented Conway's Life in COBOL. Badly. Probably. But it works.

I don't know.

Why would I lie? Stupid thing to lie about.

But, yeah, it's possible you don't have COBOL lying around on your machine.

I didn't.

A quick apt install open-cobol sorted that out for me, running Linux over here.

After that, try cobc -x coblife.cob -o coblife and see what happens.

If you are not running Linux, YMMV. At that point, to be fair, it seems reasonable to suggest that if you want to get a complete randomer's Life implementation in COBOL running on your machine, you're already at a stage where that kind of thing shouldn't be a problem in the first place. If it is, I don't really know what to say to you, other than find a version of COBOL that works locally for you, then see if you can get my coblife.cob to behave for you.

Numerous weird and wonderful COBOL problems turn out to exist, including the line length restriction thing and the whatever the hell it is that meant that I couldn't use my nice iterate over -1 to 1 twice trick I usually like to use when implementing Conway's Life. It's still there in the code, but commented out, because I was about yay close from punching a hole through my laptop when I decided that implementing a brute force neighbour search instead was probably best for my sanity. That worked.

Pull requests welcome if you can figure out how I screwed that up.

Anyway. Now I know why COBOL folk charge so much.

It was about time. My first language was BASIC, and I grew up reading about things like COBOL, FORTRAN, PASCAL and whatever, but I've never learned any of them.

Seems to me that playing about with the Ur-languages that the ones we use today grew out of is not a bad idea, as it helps us understand - and be grateful for - a good deal of the stuff that modern languages do implement, which turn out to be missing in the older languages.

You know, like proper functions. Or actual variables. Or lines that are allowed to be longer than 80 characters. Basic shit.

This has been a trip and a half.

This is very much My First COBOL program, written very quickly after reading through precisely half of one of the many online COBOL tutorials. The chances that it is anything other than extremely bad non-idiomatic COBOL are slim.

• No editor, you just get the random set of cells
• No way to restart without rerunning the whole thing
• No way to fit arbitrary terminals
• Linenumbers are probably a bad idea

This was an exercise in learning me a bisl COBOL, so here's some stuff I found that helped me, and may, if you are still reading this far down, help you too.

Your GNU-friendly free COBOL compiler. If you have access to any other COBOL compiler you are already far more experienced with COBOL than I am.

I should have read at least some of this before starting to write code. In particular, the section on available tutorials.

This is the kind of tutorial that mixes useful information with stuff that is so obviously complete rubbish that it becomes an adventure in itself trying to work out which is which. I gave up with it about halfway through after deciding I had probably gleaned enough information to write a small and crappy Life implementation. I have also probably already learned a few things wrong.

This is the one that the GNU COBOL FAQ seems to recommend most highly. Do not be deceived by the fact that it appears to have been last updated in 2002. As the GNU COBOL FAQ states: These pages are over a decade old, and like all things COBOL, still very relevant at that young of an age.