COBOL

COBOL software

The COBOL language (acronym for COmmon Business-Ooriented Language, Common Business Oriented Language) was created in 1959 with the aim of creating a universal programming language that could be used on any computer and that was oriented mainly to business, that is, to the so-called management informatics. COBOL is used primarily in business, financial, and administrative systems for businesses and governments. COBOL is still widely used in applications implemented on mainframe computers, such as batch jobs and large-scale transaction processing. However, due to its declining popularity and the retirement of experienced COBOL programmers, programs are being ported to new platforms, rewritten in modern languages, or replaced with software packages. Most COBOL programming is now purely for maintain existing applications; however, many large financial institutions were still developing new systems in COBOL as late as 2006.

History

The CODASYL commission, made up of computer manufacturers, users and the United States Department of Defense, participated in the creation of this language in May 1959. The definition of the language was completed in little more than six months, being approved by the commission in January 1960. The COBOL language was modeled after officer Grace Hopper's Flow-Matic language and Bob Bemer's IBM COMTRAN, both of which were part of the commission.

Thanks to the help of users, COBOL evolved rapidly and was revised from 1961 to 1965 to add new features. In 1968 the first ANSI version of the language came out, being subsequently revised in 1974 (COBOL ANS-74), 1985 (COBOL ANS-85, extended in 1989 with mathematical functions, finalizing the most used current standard, known as COBOL-ANSI), and in 2002 (COBOL ANS-2002).

The latest standard is COBOL 2014 which, among others, includes a new feature that allows dynamic memory management (OCCURS DYNAMIC).

There is a version of IBM Enterprise Cobol, regularly updated and released in 1991, used on host systems (Mainframe) under z/OS.

For Windows and Linux, there are several compilers and IDE-s that have been around for a long time and continue to be modernized.

• MicroFocus Visual Object COBOL For Windows 95 (the oldest IDE allowing to create GUI-s, supports WinAPI)
• MicroFocus NetExpress (the already modern IDE allowing to interact with Java, EJB, C. Also OO COBOL (object-oriented))
• MicroFocus Visual COBOL for Visual Studio and Eclipse (current IDE with WebServices)
• RM/COBOL, now owned by Microfocus, originally from the Ryan & McFarland company, who developed the compiler and runtime
• Fujitsu COBOL
• Fujitsu NetCOBOL for Windows
• Fujitsu NetCOBOL for.NET
• Fujitsu PowerCOBOL (is part of the NetCOBOL package for Windows, creating GUI applications based on ActiveX controls, supports WinAPI).

There are also currently:

• GnuCOBOL (formerly Open COBOL, which is Open Source)
• Raincode COBOL
• COBOL-IT

Features

• COBOL was designed to write self-documented programs, by separating into divisions for the declaration of procedures variables and a division to carry a record of who requested the program and who wrote it. Despite its objectives, the structure it had at its inception was insufficient for the modular structure required by corporate business systems.
• Your data types were designed to handle sorted files, so it has structures for records and variants and the key statement for indexed files.
• Types of atomic data defined by the keyword PICTURE structured fields can be defined. Which allows to define numbers with which round errors are avoided in the calculations that occur when converting the numbers to binary and which are unacceptable in commercial subjects, COBOL can employ and by default employ numbers on base ten.
• To facilitate the creation of COBOL programs, the syntax of COBOL was created in a way that was similar to English, avoiding the use of symbols that were imposed in subsequent programming languages.

Despite this, by the early 1980s it was becoming outdated with respect to the new programming paradigms and the languages that implemented them. In the 1985 revision it was solved, incorporating to COBOL local variables, recursion, dynamic memory reservation and structured programming.

In the 2002 revision, object orientation was added, although since the 1974 revision it was possible to create a work environment similar to object orientation, and a standardized method of generating graphical screens.

Before the inclusion of new features in the official standard, many compiler manufacturers added them in a non-standard way. At present this process is being seen with the integration of COBOL with the Internet. There are several compilers that allow COBOL to be used as a scripting and web service language. There are also compilers that allow you to generate COBOL code for the.NET and EJB platform.

The structure of a Program in Cobol is made up of 4 Divisions.

1. IDENTIFICATION DIVISION: It is the identifier of the program, carries the information data name author date of compilation etc.
3. ENVIRONMENT DIVISION: Indicates the hardware resources in which the program is executed, as well as the allocation of information output by means of communication.
5. DATA DIVISION: In this division are established the variables that will be used by the system and file declaration.
7. DIVISION PROCEDURE: As your name indicates, the encoded instructions are executed.

Hello World Program

  IDENTIFICATION DIVISION.  PROGRAM-ID. HOLAMUNDO.  AUTHOR. ANONIMO.    ENVIRONMENT DIVISION.  CONFIGURATION SECTION.  SOURCE-COMPUTER. RMCOBOL-85.  OBJECT-COMPUTER. RMCOBOL-85.  INPUT-OUTPUT SECTION.  FILE-CONTROL.  DATA DIVISION.  FILE SECTION.  WORKING-STORAGE SECTION.     PROCEDURE DIVISION.    DISPLAY 'Hello world'  GOBACK ..

.

Employment

Although many people believe that the COBOL language is obsolete, the reality is that almost all systems that require large batch processing capacity (Batch), both banks and other large companies with systems mainframes use COBOL. This makes it possible to guarantee the compatibility of the old systems with the most modern ones, as well as to be sure that the language is perfectly stable and tested. According to a 2005 Gartner Group report, 75% of the data generated by businesses is processed by programs created in COBOL, and in another 1997 report it estimates that 80% of the existing 300 billion lines of code are created in COBOL., with 5 billion new lines of COBOL being written each year. With all that, today, COBOL programming is one of the most profitable businesses in the world of computing. In the rest of the applications, COBOL has fallen into disuse, replaced by more modern or versatile languages.

In the media

• In the code seen from the cyborg programming of the film The Terminator (1984), some of the sentences are written in Cobol.