Next generation COBOL?

As a concept, the original COBOL (before they started tacking numbers onto it) was a thing of beauty - where with some skill you could clearly state your methodology in grammatically correct English, that even an untrained secretary could read.

Then, many years later and long after I wrote my last genuine COBOL program, I wrote a simplistic COBOL interpreter to embed applications logic in a way that I didn't have to write a manual on how to change it, and used this in several applications. To make this work, I had to scrap the Data Division concept and treat all variables like the BASIC Variant data type.

Then I wrote an AI program that needed to communicate database changes over Usenet, with its mandatory non-binary requirements on most groups. Obviously, I produced COBOL-like procedural statements to create the data, and ran them on the other end. To make this work well, I had to enhance my "COBOL" with a "With" verb to vaguely qualify paragraphs of code.

What is gradually emerging over many projects is a new concept for a distant descendant of COBOL, where things are stated in much higher-level problem-oriented terms and the details of data organization are taken care of by a much smarter execution environment than COBOL ever enjoyed. Also, it is SO simple that you could write and debug an interpreter or translator for it in something like BASIC in a week or so, so it should become ubiquitous for many of the things that VBA and Java are now used for, because of its 100% readability even by untrained people.

Perhaps I am not the only one following this path? Perhaps others have different ideas as to where this should lead? Perhaps others have solved problems that I haven't even yet realized?

What are your thoughts, ideas, suggestions, warnings, etc?

Thanks in advance
Steve Richfie1d
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