COBOL
COBOL (/ˈkoʊbɒl/, an acronym for common business-oriented language) is a compiled English-like computer programming language designed for business use.
Contents
Description
It is imperative, procedural and, since 2002, object-oriented.
Uses
COBOL is primarily used in business, finance, and administrative systems for companies and governments.
In 1997, Gartner Group estimated that there were a total of 200 billion lines of COBOL in existence, which ran 80% of all business programs.
Decline of COBOL
COBOL is still widely used in legacy applications deployed on mainframe computers, such as large-scale batch and transaction processing jobs. But due to its declining popularity and the retirement of experienced COBOL programmers, programs are being migrated to new platforms, rewritten in modern languages or replaced with software packages. Most programming in COBOL is now purely to maintain existing applications.
History
COBOL was designed in 1959 by the Conference on Data Systems Languages (CODASYL) and was partly based on previous programming language design work by Grace Hopper, commonly referred to as "the (grand)mother of COBOL".
It was created as part of a US Department of Defense effort to create a portable programming language for data processing.
Intended as a temporary stopgap, the Department of Defense promptly forced computer manufacturers to provide it, resulting in its widespread adoption.
It was standardized in 1968 and has since been revised four times.
Expansions include support for structured programming and object-oriented programming.
The current standard is ISO/IEC 1989:2014.
Syntax
COBOL has an English-like syntax, which was designed to be self-documenting and highly readable.
However, it is verbose and uses over three hundred. reserved words.
Division
COBOL code is split into four divisions (identification, environment, data and procedure) containing a rigid hierarchy of sections, paragraphs and sentences.
Specifications
Lacking a large standard library, the standard specifies:
- Forty-three statements
- Eight-seven functions
- One class
Academic disinterest and criticism
Academic computer scientists were generally uninterested in business applications when COBOL was created and were not involved in its design.
COBOL has been criticized throughout its life for its verbosity, design process and poor support for structured programming, which resulted in monolithic and incomprehensible programs (see Spaghetti code.
See also
External links
- COBOL @ Wikipedia
