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  5. COBOL vs Lua

COBOL vs Lua

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

COBOL
COBOL
Stacks130
Followers147
Votes2
Lua
Lua
Stacks2.5K
Followers1.0K
Votes180
GitHub Stars1.5K
Forks452

COBOL vs Lua: What are the differences?

Developers describe COBOL as "Imperative, procedural and, since 2002, object-oriented programming language". COBOL was one of the first programming languages to be standardised: the first COBOL standard was issued by ANSI in 1968. COBOL is primarily used in business, finance, and administrative systems for companies and governments. On the other hand, Lua is detailed as "Powerful, fast, lightweight, embeddable scripting language". Lua combines simple procedural syntax with powerful data description constructs based on associative arrays and extensible semantics. Lua is dynamically typed, runs by interpreting bytecode for a register-based virtual machine, and has automatic memory management with incremental garbage collection, making it ideal for configuration, scripting, and rapid prototyping.

COBOL and Lua can be categorized as "Languages" tools.

Lua is an open source tool with 1.26K GitHub stars and 436 GitHub forks. Here's a link to Lua's open source repository on GitHub.

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Advice on COBOL, Lua

Gamerians
Gamerians

May 21, 2020

Needs adviceonLuaLuaPythonPythonJavaJava

I am trying to make Roblox game which requires Lua. I quite don't want to go with Lua just because other tools just might let me do more projects later on. I heard that Python is most similar to Lua, but I am still not sure which tool to use. Java, I think it will help me with many stuff later on for websites, projects, and more!

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Comments

Detailed Comparison

COBOL
COBOL
Lua
Lua

COBOL was one of the first programming languages to be standardised: the first COBOL standard was issued by ANSI in 1968. COBOL is primarily used in business, finance, and administrative systems for companies and governments.

Lua combines simple procedural syntax with powerful data description constructs based on associative arrays and extensible semantics. Lua is dynamically typed, runs by interpreting bytecode for a register-based virtual machine, and has automatic memory management with incremental garbage collection, making it ideal for configuration, scripting, and rapid prototyping.

Statistics
GitHub Stars
-
GitHub Stars
1.5K
GitHub Forks
-
GitHub Forks
452
Stacks
130
Stacks
2.5K
Followers
147
Followers
1.0K
Votes
2
Votes
180
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 2
    Business Oriented Language
Cons
  • 2
    Extremely long code for simple functions
Pros
  • 41
    Fast learning curve
  • 26
    Very easy to embed in C programs
  • 26
    Efficient memory usage
  • 20
    Open source
  • 19
    Good for game scripting
Cons
  • 4
    Nooby
  • 2
    Not widespread
  • 1
    D
  • 0
    Python

What are some alternatives to COBOL, Lua?

JavaScript

JavaScript

JavaScript is most known as the scripting language for Web pages, but used in many non-browser environments as well such as node.js or Apache CouchDB. It is a prototype-based, multi-paradigm scripting language that is dynamic,and supports object-oriented, imperative, and functional programming styles.

Python

Python

Python is a general purpose programming language created by Guido Van Rossum. Python is most praised for its elegant syntax and readable code, if you are just beginning your programming career python suits you best.

PHP

PHP

Fast, flexible and pragmatic, PHP powers everything from your blog to the most popular websites in the world.

Ruby

Ruby

Ruby is a language of careful balance. Its creator, Yukihiro “Matz” Matsumoto, blended parts of his favorite languages (Perl, Smalltalk, Eiffel, Ada, and Lisp) to form a new language that balanced functional programming with imperative programming.

Java

Java

Java is a programming language and computing platform first released by Sun Microsystems in 1995. There are lots of applications and websites that will not work unless you have Java installed, and more are created every day. Java is fast, secure, and reliable. From laptops to datacenters, game consoles to scientific supercomputers, cell phones to the Internet, Java is everywhere!

Golang

Golang

Go is expressive, concise, clean, and efficient. Its concurrency mechanisms make it easy to write programs that get the most out of multicore and networked machines, while its novel type system enables flexible and modular program construction. Go compiles quickly to machine code yet has the convenience of garbage collection and the power of run-time reflection. It's a fast, statically typed, compiled language that feels like a dynamically typed, interpreted language.

HTML5

HTML5

HTML5 is a core technology markup language of the Internet used for structuring and presenting content for the World Wide Web. As of October 2014 this is the final and complete fifth revision of the HTML standard of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The previous version, HTML 4, was standardised in 1997.

C#

C#

C# (pronounced "See Sharp") is a simple, modern, object-oriented, and type-safe programming language. C# has its roots in the C family of languages and will be immediately familiar to C, C++, Java, and JavaScript programmers.

Scala

Scala

Scala is an acronym for “Scalable Language”. This means that Scala grows with you. You can play with it by typing one-line expressions and observing the results. But you can also rely on it for large mission critical systems, as many companies, including Twitter, LinkedIn, or Intel do. To some, Scala feels like a scripting language. Its syntax is concise and low ceremony; its types get out of the way because the compiler can infer them.

Elixir

Elixir

Elixir leverages the Erlang VM, known for running low-latency, distributed and fault-tolerant systems, while also being successfully used in web development and the embedded software domain.

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