Cobol (Common Business-Oriented Language)
COBOL is an anacronym for Common Business-Oriented Language. COBOL is a so-called third generation language--a language designed to be easier for a human to understand and to use to write programs. COBOL is one of the oldest of the third generation languages, along with FORTRAN and Algol. A language with English-like syntax. COBOL has proven popular with many sectors of business and government because of its reliability, ease of maintenance and global use.
COBOL is an example of structured or modular programming. The program is constructed of several coherent modules. The information within each module relates together, and modules can be logically connected. The development of COBOL was synonymous with the move away from less stuctured programming in the 1950s.
COBOL was completed in December of 1959, at about the same time as FORTRAN was developed. COBOL was developed with the intent to replace processor specific so-called assembly, or second-generation languages. Foremost, it was designed for use by people concerned with solving business problems--it was not a language designed for a particular machine. The United States Department of Defense coordinated much of the early development efforts for COBOL.
Quickly gaining acceptance among programmers, COBOL was in routine use by 1961. The first American National Standards Institute COBOL standard was the 68 (for 1968) standard. Later, ANSI 74 and 85 standards followed. Today, most COBOL programs conform to the 85 standard. An updated COBOL standard is scheduled for release in the early years of the twenty-first century.
An aspect of COBOL that greatly contributed to its popularity was its speed of input and output of information. This made it very useful for large data processing jobs, such as the processing of pay slips in a large company. Dedicated programming knowledge is required to use COBOL, however, restricting its use to those for whom computer coding language is not daunting.
COBOL has its critics, who contend that the language has outlived its usefulness, and is too verbose. Despite these criticisms, and the increasingly popularity of languages like Java and Visual Basic, it is likely that COBOL is and will remain a relevant language. There are about 100 million lines of COBOL code in use today, with 2 billion lies being added each year by an estimated 1 million COBOL programmers world-wide. A typical large business application today consists of hundreds of COBOL programs running on a mainframe computer. Throughout the 1990s, virtually all of the Fortune 500 companies used this system for their major computer applications. Moreover, the revamping of the COBOL code as a safeguard against potential year 2000 problems has made the code more robust. Many computer experts argue that COBOL will become even more relevant with the recent introduction of Tiny COBOL, a version that is compatible with Linux and with free software available on the Internet. COBOL remains the ubiquitous business development language, and leading edge developers are writing COBOL applications for the Web.
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