In the era of computing, Cobol programming language has been a still-relevant part of the industry. In many ways, Cobol programming language is considered to be more powerful than others, such as Visual Basic or C#. It is an early computer language that was initially created in 1959 by a group of employees at IBM for their mainframe computers. Unfortunately, it had a reputation for being difficult to learn and use properly.
One of the main reasons that Cobol programming language is
still relevant in the modern world is that it is extremely powerful. It was
created to handle complex business processing. This means that it could handle
many parts of the software package all at once. This way, it could solve
complex business problems much more quickly than other languages at the time.
Nowadays, Cobol programming language is still widely used in business settings
to create programs for various applications and uses.
Analyst firm Gartner said that in 2013, about 80 percent of
enterprise applications were written in Cobol. This number was down from 88
percent in 2009, but it remained a popular solution among businesses around the
world for its overall capabilities and flexibility.
One of the reasons for its popularity is that it can handle
mathematical calculations, perform data manipulation, work with text, and
access databases. Analysts at Gartner said that Cobol programming language also
has a high reliability rating, which is why users still like it despite the
fact that it can be difficult to learn.
Open Cobol Alliance (OCA) was formed in 1998 to represent
Cobol as an open source solution. Cobol was released under GPL by Intel in
2013. OCA has created an umbrella organization called the Free Standards Group
(FSG), which allow developers around the world to act as one group instead of
smaller independent organizations working on their own version of open source
programs.
OCA said that the main goal of free and open source Cobol is
to make sure that Cobol is easily available as a solution for companies as well
as individuals working on their own applications. In addition, the Cobol
programming language will be freely viewable and easily available for
programmers looking to learn about it.
In IBM’s contribution, the company has established a
development platform called Eclipse OMR. This allows developers to create
easy-to-use programs with a graphical interface. Eclipse OMR also simplifies
common tasks such as debugging, testing, and profiling applications so
programmers won’t have to worry about those details when they are creating
their programs.
The name "Cobol" derives from the phrase
"Common Obejct-Oriented Language".
The syntax was formally defined in 1963 by Kock and Hart.
Cobol is an imperative programming language with procedural
statements and data declarations.
Data types such as integers and real numbers can be typed
directly in Cobol.
Assignment, including limited expressions, is possible.
Assignment between identical variables is allowed: no error
or warning occurs if a value "X" is assigned to a variable
"X". This semantics contrasts with FORTRAN where errors occur, and
the same semantics makes the language more friendly for jobs that involve
manipulating large sets of input data without human intervention.
Cobol supports the three-address instruction format where
multiple addresses may be processed in one cycle. This makes it efficient for
multidimensional arrays and for data processing such as data tables.
The standard Cobol compiler has a control structure called
the do loop that can be used to collect several sets of operands into a single
cycle: looping like this is not possible in most other languages, because all
loops in most other languages require a RETURN statement.
Cobol contains no exceptions; each error generates an
EXCEPTION statement with text and tags attached. The programmer receives the
error message and the processor state at the time of the error.
Cobol is a block-structured language with many reserved
words that affect control flow of the program. The reserved words are called
"identifier", but they are treated differently from identifiers of
other languages. For instance, an IF statement cannot be replaced by an
alternate construct in Cobol programs, unlike in some other languages.
Because Cobol was developed during the late 1950s and early
1960s there are several features of Cobol that have not aged well, such as the
use of indirection to specify relative file addresses on punched cards, ability
to process card images directly, etc. But even with these features removed, it
still constitutes a considerable improvement over previous programming
languages for business data processing applications.
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