COBOL is a third generation programming language (3GL), is also one of the oldest programming languages that is still in use today. It stands for COmmon Business-Oriented Language. COBOL languages can primarly be found in areas like business and finance for the government, as well as many companies. COBOL Language first appeared in late 1959, after a short-range committee, formed during a meeting at the Pentagon, was asked to recommend a new approach to a common business language. COBOL was created to fulfill two major objectives: portability (ability of programs to be run with minimum modification on computers from different manufacturers) and readability (ease with which a program can be read like ordinary English).
Features of COBOL
- COBOL as defined in the original specification included a PICTURE clause for detailed field specification. It did not support local variables, recursion, dynamic memory allocation, or structured programming constructs. Support for some or all of these features has been added in later editions of the COBOL standard.
- COBOL has many reserved words (over 400), called keywords. The original COBOL specification supported self-modifying code via the infamous "ALTER X TO PROCEED TO Y" statement. This capability has since been removed.
For over four decades COBOL has been the dominant programming language in the business computing domain. In that time it it has seen off the challenges of a number of other languages such as PL1, Algol68, Pascal, Modula, Ada, C, C++. All these languages have found a niche but none has yet displaced COBOL. Two recent challengers though, Java and Visual Basic, are proving to be serious contenders.
COBOL applications are also very long-lived. The huge investment in creating a software application consisting of some millions of lines of COBOL code means that the application cannot simply be discarded when some new programming language or technology appears.
