[gbronner]

I had not worked with cobol until recently.

If you have a solid background in C, it is not very hard to learn. It seems to show up at older companies, and is fairly good at moving and reformatting records where you want to address each field on a character by character basis.

Unlike more modern languages, there's no encapsulation, polymorphism, local variables, etc., so you can write tangled code quite easily, though the code I've seen has been very well written. Everything is in capital letters, and the character set is often ebcdic. Most numbers are fixed decimals, which leads to some unusual math results.

As a result, it can be maddeningly verbose -- I've seen 100+ lines of code that would just be a single printf statement in most other languages.