COBOL is for Big Data. Well, sort of. Awhile back, I noticed that the COBOL SORT verb was overpowered. Rather than sorting an array of items or even sorting a file, it included a generalized ability to stream in arbitrary inputs — () => Stream[T] —, where T is a key/value pair, and process the outputs in order — SortedStream[T] => (). This power is useful if you are writing a map-reduce program, but excessive for sorting. So, let’s look at how this was implemented, why it was part of ...
