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COBOL

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2
Markdown

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+ 1
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COBOL vs Markdown: What are the differences?

COBOL: 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; Markdown: Text-to-HTML conversion tool/syntax for web writers, by John Gruber. Markdown is two things: (1) a plain text formatting syntax; and (2) a software tool, written in Perl, that converts the plain text formatting to HTML.

COBOL and Markdown can be primarily classified as "Languages" tools.

Decisions about COBOL and Markdown

AsciiDoc belongs to the family of lightweight markup languages, the most renowned of which is Markdown. AsciiDoc stands out from this group because it supports all the structural elements necessary for drafting articles, technical manuals, books, presentations and prose.

This includes, for example, admonitions, variables, the include statement, example blocks, footnotes, keyboard macro, equations and formular support (albeid only with asciidoctor and installed plugin iirc), automatic toc and header, description lists, actually usable tables, etc ...

In combination with Antora one can built the most awesome, versioned, and Dont-Repeat-Yourself but-also "Fully-Explain-without-just-Linking" documentation ever.

GitHub has built-in support for it, albeid not for it's include directive, though that can be dealt with by using CI to invoke asciidoctor-reducer or publishing a github page that has been rendered using the asciidoctor/antora renderer.

https://docs.checkmk.com/ uses Asciidoctor. Linus Torvalds once recommended Asciidoctor (1).

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Pros of COBOL
Pros of Markdown
  • 2
    Business Oriented Language
  • 345
    Easy formatting
  • 246
    Widely adopted
  • 194
    Intuitive
  • 132
    Github integration
  • 41
    Great for note taking
  • 2
    Defacto GitHub lingo

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Cons of COBOL
Cons of Markdown
  • 2
    Extremely long code for simple functions
  • 2
    Cannot centralise (HTML code needed)
  • 1
    Inconsistend flavours eg github, reddit, mmd etc
  • 1
    Limited syntax
  • 1
    Not suitable for longer documents
  • 1
    Non-extensible
  • 1
    No right indentation
  • 1
    No underline
  • 1
    Unable to indent tables

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What is COBOL?

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.

What is Markdown?

Markdown is two things: (1) a plain text formatting syntax; and (2) a software tool, written in Perl, that converts the plain text formatting to HTML.

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What companies use COBOL?
What companies use Markdown?
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What tools integrate with COBOL?
What tools integrate with Markdown?

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What are some alternatives to COBOL and Markdown?
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.
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!
C lang
Cobalt
Sign up for free in just a few minutes and ask our top researchers to evaluate the security of your web or mobile app. Decide to run either a bug bounty program or an agile crowdsourced security audit. Choose from our Core of vetted researchers or the whole Crowd.
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.
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