35 Facts About COBOL 2002

1.

COBOL 2002 is a compiled English-like computer programming language designed for business use.

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2.

COBOL 2002 is primarily used in business, finance, and administrative systems for companies and governments.

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3.

COBOL 2002 is still widely used in applications deployed on mainframe computers, such as large-scale batch and transaction processing jobs.

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4.

COBOL 2002 was designed in 1959 by CODASYL and was partly based on the programming language FLOW-MATIC designed by Grace Hopper.

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5.

COBOL 2002 statements have an English-like syntax, which was designed to be self-documenting and highly readable.

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6.

COBOL 2002 code is split into four divisions containing a rigid hierarchy of sections, paragraphs and sentences.

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7.

Academic computer scientists were generally uninterested in business applications when COBOL 2002 was created and were not involved in its design; it was 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.

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8.

COBOL 2002 has been criticized throughout its life for its verbosity, design process, and poor support for structured programming.

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9.

Years, COBOL 2002 has been assumed as a programming language for business operations in mainframes, although in recent years an increasing interest has surged on migrating COBOL 2002 operations to cloud computing.

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10.

FLOW-MATIC's major contributions to COBOL 2002 were long variable names, English words for commands and the separation of data descriptions and instructions.

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11.

Features from COMTRAN incorporated into COBOL 2002 included formulas, the PICTURE clause, an improved IF statement, which obviated the need for GO TOs, and a more robust file management system.

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12.

On 6 and 7 December, the same COBOL 2002 program ran on an RCA computer and a Remington-Rand Univac computer, demonstrating that compatibility could be achieved.

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13.

COBOL 2002 is an industry language and is not the property of any company or group of companies, or of any organization or group of organizations.

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14.

Many logical flaws were found in COBOL 2002 60, leading General Electric's Charles Katz to warn that it could not be interpreted unambiguously.

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15.

In late 1962, IBM announced that COBOL 2002 would be their primary development language and that development of COMTRAN would cease.

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16.

COBOL 2002 specification was revised three times in the five years after its publication.

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17.

The vice-president, William Rinehuls, complained that two-thirds of the COBOL 2002 community did not know of the committee's existence.

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18.

In 1974, ANSI published a revised version of COBOL 2002, containing new features such as file organizations, the DELETE statement and the segmentation module.

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19.

The report writer was slated to be removed from COBOL 2002, but was reinstated before the standard was published.

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20.

COBOL 2002 suffered from poor support: no compilers completely supported the standard.

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21.

The particular level of effort required to correct COBOL 2002 code has been attributed to the large amount of business-oriented COBOL 2002, as business applications use dates heavily, and to fixed-length data fields.

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22.

Similarly, the US Internal Revenue Service rushed to patch its COBOL 2002-based Individual Master File in order to disburse the tens of millions of payments mandated by the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act.

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23.

COBOL 2002 has an English-like syntax, which is used to describe nearly everything in a program.

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24.

Each COBOL 2002 program is made up of four basic lexical items: words, literals, picture character-strings and separators.

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25.

COBOL 2002 program is split into four divisions: the identification division, the environment division, the data division and the procedure division.

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26.

COBOL 2002's syntax is usually described with a unique metalanguage using braces, brackets, bars and underlining.

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27.

Data items in COBOL 2002 are declared hierarchically through the use of level-numbers which indicate if a data item is part of another.

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28.

Attempts to remove GO TOs from COBOL 2002 code resulted in convoluted programs and reduced code quality.

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29.

COBOL 2002 programs were infamous for being monolithic and lacking modularization.

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30.

Nevertheless, much important legacy COBOL 2002 software uses unstructured code, which has become unmaintainable.

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31.

COBOL 2002 was intended to be a highly portable, "common" language.

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32.

COBOL 2002 was intended to be easy for programmers to learn and use, while still being readable to non-technical staff such as managers.

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33.

COBOL 2002 community has always been isolated from the computer science community.

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34.

Later, COBOL suffered from a shortage of material covering it; it took until 1963 for introductory books to appear .

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35.

COBOL standards have repeatedly suffered from delays: COBOL-85 arrived five years later than hoped, COBOL 2002 was five years late, and COBOL 2014 was six years late.

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