@timbray I asked it to write me a function in Cobol to get the contents of a URL. It just shells out to curl to do the real work.

I don't know Cobol and it might work but I'm guessing that's not the correct solution. I can see if you search google there is at least one message board comment where someone admits to not knowing much but suggest calling wget or curl. I think the old folks writing Cobol are going to be fine.