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COBOL Programming Language History
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COBOL programming language history
history of COBOL Programming language
history of the COBOL Programming language
- Snippet from Wikipedia: COBOL
COBOL (; an acronym for "common business-oriented language") is a compiled English-like computer programming language designed for business use. It is an imperative, procedural, and, since 2002, object-oriented language. COBOL is primarily used in business, finance, and administrative systems for companies and governments. COBOL is still widely used in applications deployed on mainframe computers, such as large-scale batch and transaction processing jobs. Many large financial institutions were developing new systems in the language as late as 2006, but most programming in COBOL today is purely to maintain existing applications. Programs are being moved to new platforms, rewritten in modern languages, or replaced with other software.
COBOL was designed in 1959 by CODASYL and was partly based on the programming language FLOW-MATIC, designed by Grace Hopper. It was created as part of a U.S. Department of Defense effort to create a portable programming language for data processing. It was originally seen as a stopgap, but the Defense Department promptly pressured computer manufacturers to provide it, resulting in its widespread adoption. It was standardized in 1968 and has been revised five times. Expansions include support for structured and object-oriented programming. The current standard is ISO/IEC 1989:2023.
COBOL statements have prose syntax such as
MOVE x TO y, which was designed to be self-documenting and highly readable. However, it is verbose and uses over 300 reserved words compared to the succinct and mathematically inspired syntax of other languages.The COBOL code is split into four divisions (identification, environment, data, and procedure), containing a rigid hierarchy of sections, paragraphs, and sentences. Lacking a large standard library, the standard specifies 43 statements, 87 functions, and just one class.
Academic computer scientists were generally uninterested in business applications when COBOL was created and were not involved in its design; it was (effectively) designed from the ground up as a computer language for business, with an emphasis on inputs and outputs, whose only data types were numbers and strings of text.
COBOL has been criticized for its verbosity, design process, and poor support for structured programming. These weaknesses result in monolithic programs that are hard to comprehend as a whole, despite their local readability.
For years, COBOL has been assumed as a programming language for business operations in mainframes, although in recent years, many COBOL operations have been moved to cloud computing.
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COBOL: COBOL Fundamentals, COBOL Inventor - COBOL Language Designer: 1959 by Howard Bromberg, Norman Discount, Vernon Reeves, Jean E. Sammet, William Selden, Gertrude Tierney, with indirect influence from Grace Hopper, CODASYL, ANSI COBOL, ISO/IEC COBOL; Modern COBOL - Legacy COBOL, IBM COBOL, COBOL keywords, COBOL data structures - COBOL algorithms, COBOL syntax, Visual COBOL, COBOL on Windows, COBOL on Linux, COBOL on UNIX, COBOL on macOS, Mainframe COBOL, IBM i COBOL, IBM Mainframe DevOps, COBOL Standards, COBOL Paradigms (Imperative COBOL, Procedural COBOL, Object-Oriented COBOL - COBOL OOP, Functional COBOL), COBOL syntax, COBOL installation, COBOL containerization, COBOL configuration, COBOL compilers, COBOL IDEs, COBOL development tools, COBOL DevOps - COBOL SRE, COBOL data science - COBOL DataOps, COBOL machine learning, COBOL deep learning, COBOL concurrency, COBOL history, COBOL bibliography, COBOL glossary, COBOL topics, COBOL courses, COBOL Standard Library, COBOL libraries, COBOL frameworks, COBOL research, Grace Hopper, COBOL GitHub, Written in COBOL, COBOL popularity, COBOL Awesome list, COBOL Versions. (navbar_cobol)
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