Closing arguments.

[JanneVee]

All your statements are true.

I have a little expirience with COBOL and the conclusion I came to was. The long development times of COBOL is an effective Anti-Hack mechanism.

The design thing(tm) in Perl is make it fast to develop. But after a hour of coding you end up with code that works and does everything that the COBOL program does(after say 4 hours of coding). Under that hour you're most likely to take the solution that first pops up. Compared to the knowledge you're going to waste alot of time if you pick the wrong one. With COBOL you plan your work different.

And as for Buss sensetive code (if the programmer gets run over by a buss -> no one can figure out the program). You can write COBOL extremly Obfuscated. You can write Perl Obfuscated. (true statements?) . Cobol is hard to develop with!(true statement). Perl is easy to develop and deliberately obfuscate (to keep support or what ever.). All these staments lead to That if it is hard to develop it should be hard to "waste" time on deliberately obfuscate the code. The horror story of Perl, a really good Perl programmer writes code that he says it is the best code he ever written. It is about 200 lines of Perl. The guy quits and no one can figure out the script. A rewrite was nessecery and they ended up with code that was about 300 lines. He was indispensable but he didn't work much to get the code impossible to understand. It is a little more work to do the same thing in COBOL. It can be done and usually done for a reason. The perl-programmer did not intend to write the code hard to understand.

The defense rests!