35 Facts About COBOL

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

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.

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

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

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

Academic computer scientists were generally uninterested in business applications when COBOL 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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

COBOL programs were infamous for being monolithic and lacking modularization.

COBOL-74 added subprograms, giving programmers the ability to control the data each part of the program could access.

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

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

COBOL-85 was not fully compatible with earlier versions, and its development was controversial.

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

Yet by 1984, maintainers of COBOL programs were struggling to deal with "incomprehensible" code and the main changes in COBOL-85 were there to help ease maintenance.

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

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