- Full Form Of COBOL is Common Business Oriented Language.
- COBOL is a high-level programming language designed for the business applications. It is the second oldest programming language as FORTRAN is the oldest.
- COBOL is mainly used in trade, finance, and administrative systems for companies and governments.
- COBOL is still widely used in legacy applications deployed on mainframe computers, such as large-scale batch and transaction processing jobs. But its popularity is declining and due to the retirement of experienced COBOL programmers, programs are migrating to the new platform.
Features Of COBOL
- 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 (see § PICTURE clause) and separators. They are up to 31 characters long and may include letters, digits, hyphens and underscores.
- A COBOL program is split into four divisions: the identification division, the environment division, the data division and the procedure division.
History Of COBOL
COBOL was invented in late 1950s by the Grace Hopper. Earlier each computer maker has to use its own programming language to function a computer. COBOL programs could run on more than one computer of different manufacturers and hence was immediately adopted by the Department of Defense (DoD) as they have to purchase computers from different buyers.
Since 1960, it has undergone various updates and improvements. The American National Standards Institute (ANSI) has produced various revisions of COBOL, e.g. COBOL-68, COBOL-74, COBOL-85 and COBOL-2002. COBOL format is no longer being supported by new systems hence, it is called Legacy Language.
