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  5. COBOL vs Common Lisp

COBOL vs Common Lisp

OverviewComparisonAlternatives

Overview

COBOL
COBOL
Stacks130
Followers147
Votes2
Common Lisp
Common Lisp
Stacks268
Followers255
Votes145

COBOL vs Common Lisp: What are the differences?

Key Differences between COBOL and Common Lisp

COBOL (Common Business-Oriented Language) and Common Lisp are two programming languages with distinct characteristics and purposes. Here are the key differences between the two:

  1. Syntax and Purpose: COBOL is primarily used for business-oriented applications and system programming, whereas Common Lisp is a general-purpose language often used in artificial intelligence (AI) and symbolic computing. COBOL's syntax is more verbose and English-like, while Common Lisp uses a more flexible and concise syntax with strong support for functional programming.

  2. Data Types and Abstraction: COBOL has a fixed set of built-in data types designed for traditional data processing, such as numbers and strings. In contrast, Common Lisp offers a rich set of built-in data types and supports user-defined data structures, making it more suitable for complex data manipulation and abstraction.

  3. Procedural vs Functional Paradigm: COBOL follows a procedural programming paradigm where computations are organized as a sequence of steps, while Common Lisp supports both procedural and functional programming. Lisp's functional programming features, such as higher-order functions and anonymous functions, provide powerful abstractions and enable elegant solutions to complex problems.

  4. Legacy vs Modern Usage: COBOL has a long history, dating back to the 1960s, and is still widely used in legacy systems, particularly in the financial industry. On the other hand, Common Lisp is often used in modern applications that require advanced language features, such as AI, expert systems, and rapid prototyping.

  5. Libraries and Ecosystem: COBOL has a more limited set of libraries and frameworks compared to Common Lisp, as it is often used in specialized domains with specific requirements. Common Lisp, being more versatile, has a larger ecosystem of libraries and frameworks that cover a wide range of application domains, providing developers with ample tools and resources.

  6. Level of Standardization: COBOL has a well-defined ANSI standard and multiple language versions, with some variations existing between implementations. Conversely, Common Lisp has a common standard called ANSI Common Lisp, which ensures code portability across different implementations.

In Summary, COBOL is a business-oriented programming language with a focus on traditional data processing, while Common Lisp is a versatile language used for a broader range of applications, including AI and symbolic computing. Lisp offers a richer feature set, functional programming capabilities, and a more extensive ecosystem compared to COBOL.

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Detailed Comparison

COBOL
COBOL
Common Lisp
Common Lisp

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.

Lisp was originally created as a practical mathematical notation for computer programs, influenced by the notation of Alonzo Church's lambda calculus. It quickly became the favored programming language for artificial intelligence (AI) research. As one of the earliest programming languages, Lisp pioneered many ideas in computer science, including tree data structures, automatic storage management, dynamic typing, conditionals, higher-order functions, recursion, and the self-hosting compiler. [source: wikipedia]

Statistics
Stacks
130
Stacks
268
Followers
147
Followers
255
Votes
2
Votes
145
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 2
    Business Oriented Language
Cons
  • 2
    Extremely long code for simple functions
Pros
  • 24
    Flexibility
  • 22
    High-performance
  • 17
    Comfortable: garbage collection, closures, macros, REPL
  • 13
    Stable
  • 12
    Lisp
Cons
  • 4
    Too many Parentheses
  • 3
    Standard did not evolve since 1994
  • 2
    No hygienic macros
  • 2
    Small library ecosystem
  • 1
    Ultra-conservative community

What are some alternatives to COBOL, Common Lisp?

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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