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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.
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).
Pros of COBOL
- Business Oriented Language2
Pros of Markdown
- Easy formatting345
- Widely adopted246
- Intuitive194
- Github integration132
- Great for note taking41
- Defacto GitHub lingo2
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Cons of COBOL
- Extremely long code for simple functions2
Cons of Markdown
- Cannot centralise (HTML code needed)2
- Inconsistend flavours eg github, reddit, mmd etc1
- Limited syntax1
- Not suitable for longer documents1
- Non-extensible1
- No right indentation1
- No underline1
- Unable to indent tables1