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COBOL

January 01, 1970

COBOL (/ˈkoʊbɒl, -bɔːl/; an acronym for "common business-oriented language") is a compiled English-like computer programming language designed for business use. It is an imperative, procedural and, since 2002, object-oriented language. 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. Many large financial institutions were developing new systems in the language as late as 2006,[9] but most programming in COBOL today is purely to maintain existing applications. Programs are being moved to new platforms, rewritten in modern languages or replaced with other software.[10]

COBOL
The COBOL 60 report to CODASYL (April 1960)
ParadigmProcedural, imperative, object-oriented, generic
Designed byHoward Bromberg, Norman Discount, Vernon Reeves, Jean E. Sammet, William Selden, Gertrude Tierney, with indirect influence from Grace Hopper[1]
DevelopersCODASYL, ANSI, ISO/IEC
First appeared1959; 65 years ago (1959)
Stable release
ISO/IEC 1989:2023 / 2023
Typing disciplineWeak, static
Filename extensions.cbl, .cob, .cpy
Major implementations
GnuCOBOL, IBM COBOL, Micro Focus Visual COBOL
Dialects
COBOL/2, DEC COBOL-10, DEC PDP-11 COBOL, DEC PDP-11 COBOL-85, DEC VAX COBOL, DOSVS COBOL, Envyr ICOBOL, Fujitsu COBOL, Hitachi COBOL2002, HP3000 COBOL/II, IBM COBOL SAA, IBM COBOL/400, IBM COBOL/II, IBM Enterprise COBOL, IBM ILE COBOL, IBM OS/VS COBOL, ICL COBOL (VME), Micro Focus ACUCOBOL-GT, Micro Focus COBOL-IT, Micro Focus RM/COBOL, Micro Focus Visual COBOL, Microsoft COBOL, Raincode COBOL, Realia COBOL, Ryan McFarland RM/COBOL, Ryan McFarland RM/COBOL-85, Tandem (NonStop) COBOL, Tandem (NonStop) SCOBOL, UNIVAC COBOL, Unisys MCP COBOL74, Unisys MCP COBOL85, Unix COBOL X/Open, Veryant isCOBOL, Wang VS COBOL
Influenced by
Initial: AIMACO, COMTRAN, FACT, FLOW-MATIC
COBOL 2002:[a] C++, Eiffel, Smalltalk
Influenced
CobolScript,[5] EGL,[6] PL/I,[7] PL/B[8]
  • COBOL at Wikibooks

COBOL was designed in 1959 by CODASYL and was partly based on the programming language FLOW-MATIC designed by Grace Hopper. It was created as part of a U.S. Department of Defense effort to create a portable programming language for data processing. It was originally seen as a stopgap, but the Defense Department promptly forced computer manufacturers to provide it, resulting in its widespread adoption.[11] It was standardized in 1968 and has been revised five times. Expansions include support for structured and object-oriented programming. The current standard is ISO/IEC 1989:2023.[12]

COBOL statements have prose syntax such as MOVE x TO y, which was designed to be self-documenting and highly readable. However, it is verbose and uses over 300 reserved words. This contrasts with the succinct and mathematically inspired syntax of other languages (in this case, y = x;).

COBOL code is split into four divisions (identification, environment, data, and procedure) containing a rigid hierarchy of sections, paragraphs and sentences. Lacking a large standard library, the standard specifies 43 statements, 87 functions and just one class.

Academic computer scientists were generally uninterested in business applications when COBOL was created and were not involved in its design; it was (effectively) 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.[13]

COBOL has been criticized for its verbosity, design process, and poor support for structured programming. These weaknesses result in monolithic programs that are hard to comprehend as a whole, despite their local readability.

For years, COBOL has been assumed as a programming language for business operations in mainframes,[14] although in recent years, many COBOL operations have been moved to cloud computing.[15]

History and specification edit

Timeline of COBOL language
Year Informal name ANSI INCITS Standard ISO/IEC Standard
1960 COBOL-60 — —
1961 COBOL-61 — —
1963 COBOL-61 Extended — —
1965 COBOL-65 — —
1968 COBOL-68 X3.23-1968 —
1974 COBOL-74 X3.23-1974 —
1985 COBOL-85 X3.23-1985 1989:1985
2002 COBOL-2002 — 1989:2002
2014 COBOL-2014 — 1989:2014
2023 COBOL-2023 — 1989:2023

Background edit

In the late 1950s, computer users and manufacturers were becoming concerned about the rising cost of programming. A 1959 survey had found that in any data processing installation, the programming cost US$800,000 on average and that translating programs to run on new hardware would cost $600,000. At a time when new programming languages were proliferating, the same survey suggested that if a common business-oriented language were used, conversion would be far cheaper and faster.[16]

On 8 April 1959, Mary K. Hawes, a computer scientist at Burroughs Corporation, called a meeting of representatives from academia, computer users, and manufacturers at the University of Pennsylvania to organize a formal meeting on common business languages.[17] Representatives included Grace Hopper (inventor of the English-like data processing language FLOW-MATIC), Jean Sammet and Saul Gorn.[18][19]

At the April meeting, the group asked the Department of Defense (DoD) to sponsor an effort to create a common business language. The delegation impressed Charles A. Phillips, director of the Data System Research Staff at the DoD,[20] who thought that they "thoroughly understood" the DoD's problems. The DoD operated 225 computers, had 175 more on order and had spent over $200 million on implementing programs to run on them. Portable programs would save time, reduce costs and ease modernization.[21]

Charles Phillips agreed to sponsor the meeting and tasked the delegation with drafting the agenda.[22]

COBOL 60 edit

On 28 and 29 May 1959 (exactly one year after the Zürich ALGOL 58 meeting), a meeting was held at the Pentagon to discuss the creation of a common programming language for business. It was attended by 41 people and was chaired by Phillips.[23] The Department of Defense was concerned about whether it could run the same data processing programs on different computers. FORTRAN, the only mainstream language at the time, lacked the features needed to write such programs.[24]

Representatives enthusiastically described a language that could work in a wide variety of environments, from banking and insurance to utilities and inventory control. They agreed unanimously that more people should be able to program and that the new language should not be restricted by the limitations of contemporary technology. A majority agreed that the language should make maximal use of English, be capable of change, be machine-independent and be easy to use, even at the expense of power.[25]

The meeting resulted in the creation of a steering committee and short, intermediate and long-range committees. The short-range committee was given to September (three months) to produce specifications for an interim language, which would then be improved upon by the other committees.[26][27] Their official mission, however, was to identify the strengths and weaknesses of existing programming languages and did not explicitly direct them to create a new language.[24]

The deadline was met with disbelief by the short-range committee.[28] One member, Betty Holberton, described the three-month deadline as "gross optimism" and doubted that the language really would be a stopgap.[29]

The steering committee met on 4 June and agreed to name the entire activity as the Committee on Data Systems Languages, or CODASYL, and to form an executive committee.[30]

The short-range committee members represented six computer manufacturers and three government agencies. The computer manufacturers were Burroughs Corporation, IBM, Minneapolis-Honeywell (Honeywell Labs), RCA, Sperry Rand, and Sylvania Electric Products. The government agencies were the U.S. Air Force, the Navy's David Taylor Model Basin, and the National Bureau of Standards (now the National Institute of Standards and Technology).[31] The committee was chaired by Joseph Wegstein of the U.S. National Bureau of Standards. Work began by investigating data description, statements, existing applications and user experiences.[32]

The committee mainly examined the FLOW-MATIC, AIMACO and COMTRAN programming languages.[24][33] The FLOW-MATIC language was particularly influential because it had been implemented and because AIMACO was a derivative of it with only minor changes.[34][35] FLOW-MATIC's inventor, Grace Hopper, also served as a technical adviser to the committee.[28] FLOW-MATIC's major contributions to COBOL were long variable names, English words for commands and the separation of data descriptions and instructions.[36]

Hopper is sometimes called "the mother of COBOL" or "the grandmother of COBOL",[37][38][39] although Jean Sammet, a lead designer of COBOL, said Hopper "was not the mother, creator or developer of Cobol".[40][1]

IBM's COMTRAN language, invented by Bob Bemer, was regarded as a competitor to FLOW-MATIC[41][42] by a short-range committee made up of colleagues of Grace Hopper.[43] Some of its features were not incorporated into COBOL so that it would not look like IBM had dominated the design process,[26] and Jean Sammet said in 1981 that there had been a "strong anti-IBM bias" from some committee members (herself included).[44] In one case, after Roy Goldfinger, author of the COMTRAN manual and intermediate-range committee member, attended a subcommittee meeting to support his language and encourage the use of algebraic expressions, Grace Hopper sent a memo to the short-range committee reiterating Sperry Rand's efforts to create a language based on English.[45]

In 1980, Grace Hopper commented that "COBOL 60 is 95% FLOW-MATIC" and that COMTRAN had had an "extremely small" influence. Furthermore, she said that she would claim that work was influenced by both FLOW-MATIC and COMTRAN only to "keep other people happy [so they] wouldn't try to knock us out".[46]

Features from COMTRAN incorporated into COBOL included formulas,[47] the PICTURE clause,[48] an improved IF statement, which obviated the need for GO TOs, and a more robust file management system.[41]

The usefulness of the committee's work was subject of great debate. While some members thought the language had too many compromises and was the result of design by committee, others felt it was better than the three languages examined. Some felt the language was too complex; others, too simple.[49]

Controversial features included those some considered useless or too advanced for data processing users. Such features included Boolean expressions, formulas and table subscripts (indices).[50][51] Another point of controversy was whether to make keywords context-sensitive and the effect that would have on readability.[50] Although context-sensitive keywords were rejected, the approach was later used in PL/I and partially in COBOL from 2002.[52] Little consideration was given to interactivity, interaction with operating systems (few existed at that time) and functions (thought of as purely mathematical and of no use in data processing).[53][54]

The specifications were presented to the executive committee on 4 September. They fell short of expectations: Joseph Wegstein noted that "it contains rough spots and requires some additions", and Bob Bemer later described them as a "hodgepodge". The subcommittee was given until December to improve it.[28]

At a mid-September meeting, the committee discussed the new language's name. Suggestions included "BUSY" (Business System), "INFOSYL" (Information System Language) and "COCOSYL" (Common Computer Systems Language).[55] It is unclear who coined the name "COBOL",[56][57] although Bob Bemer later claimed it had been his suggestion.[58][59][60]

In October, the intermediate-range committee received copies of the FACT language specification created by Roy Nutt. Its features impressed the committee so much that they passed a resolution to base COBOL on it.[61]

This was a blow to the short-range committee, who had made good progress on the specification. Despite being technically superior, FACT had not been created with portability in mind or through manufacturer and user consensus. It also lacked a demonstrable implementation,[28] allowing supporters of a FLOW-MATIC-based COBOL to overturn the resolution. RCA representative Howard Bromberg also blocked FACT, so that RCA's work on a COBOL implementation would not go to waste.[62]

It soon became apparent that the committee was too large for any further progress to be made quickly. A frustrated Howard Bromberg bought a $15 tombstone with "COBOL" engraved on it and sent it to Charles Phillips to demonstrate his displeasure.[b][64][65]

A sub-committee was formed to analyze existing languages and was made up of six individuals:[24][66]

  • William Selden and Gertrude Tierney of IBM,
  • Howard Bromberg and Howard Discount of RCA,
  • Vernon Reeves and Jean E. Sammet of Sylvania Electric Products.

The sub-committee did most of the work creating the specification, leaving the short-range committee to review and modify their work before producing the finished specification.[24]

The specifications were approved by the executive committee on 8 January 1960, and sent to the government printing office, which printed them as COBOL 60. The language's stated objectives were to allow efficient, portable programs to be easily written, to allow users to move to new systems with minimal effort and cost, and to be suitable for inexperienced programmers.[67]

The CODASYL Executive Committee later created the COBOL Maintenance Committee to answer questions from users and vendors and to improve and expand the specifications.[68]

During 1960, the list of manufacturers planning to build COBOL compilers grew. By September, five more manufacturers had joined CODASYL (Bendix, Control Data Corporation, General Electric (GE), National Cash Register and Philco), and all represented manufacturers had announced COBOL compilers. GE and IBM planned to integrate COBOL into their own languages, GECOM and COMTRAN, respectively. In contrast, International Computers and Tabulators planned to replace their language, CODEL, with COBOL.[69]

Meanwhile, RCA and Sperry Rand worked on creating COBOL compilers. The first COBOL program ran on 17 August on an RCA 501.[70] On 6 and 7 December, the same COBOL program (albeit with minor changes) ran on an RCA computer and a Remington-Rand Univac computer, demonstrating that compatibility could be achieved.[71]

The relative influences of which languages were used continues to this day in the recommended advisory printed in all COBOL reference manuals:

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.

No warranty, expressed or implied, is made by any contributor or by the CODASYL COBOL Committee as to the accuracy and functioning of the programming system and language. Moreover, no responsibility is assumed by any contributor, or by the committee, in connection therewith. The authors and copyright holders of the copyrighted material used herein are as follows:

FLOW-MATIC (trademark of Unisys Corporation), Programming for the UNIVAC (R) I and II, Data Automation Systems, copyrighted 1958, 1959, by Unisys Corporation; IBM Commercial Translator Form No. F28-8013, copyrighted 1959 by IBM; FACT, DSI 27A5260-2760, copyrighted 1960 by Minneapolis-Honeywell.

They have specifically authorized the use of this material, in whole or in part, in the COBOL specifications. Such authorization extends to the reproduction and use of COBOL specifications in programming manuals or similar publications.[72]

COBOL-61 to COBOL-65 edit

It is rather unlikely that Cobol will be around by the end of the decade.

Anonymous, June 1960[73]

Many logical flaws were found in COBOL 60, leading General Electric's Charles Katz to warn that it could not be interpreted unambiguously. A reluctant short-term committee performed a total cleanup and, by March 1963, it was reported that COBOL's syntax was as definable as ALGOL's, although semantic ambiguities remained.[69]

COBOL is a difficult language to write a compiler for, due to the large syntax and many optional elements within syntactic constructs as well as to the need to generate efficient code for a language with many possible data representations, implicit type conversions, and necessary set-ups for I/O operations.[74] Early COBOL compilers were primitive and slow. A 1962 US Navy evaluation found compilation speeds of 3–11 statements per minute. By mid-1964, they had increased to 11–1000 statements per minute. It was observed that increasing memory would drastically increase speed and that compilation costs varied wildly: costs per statement were between $0.23 and $18.91.[75]

In late 1962, IBM announced that COBOL would be their primary development language and that development of COMTRAN would cease.[75]

The COBOL specification was revised three times in the five years after its publication. COBOL-60 was replaced in 1961 by COBOL-61. This was then replaced by the COBOL-61 Extended specifications in 1963, which introduced the sort and report writer facilities.[76] The added facilities corrected flaws identified by Honeywell in late 1959 in a letter to the short-range committee.[70] COBOL Edition 1965 brought further clarifications to the specifications and introduced facilities for handling mass storage files and tables.[77]

COBOL-68 edit

Efforts began to standardize COBOL to overcome incompatibilities between versions. In late 1962, both ISO and the United States of America Standards Institute (now ANSI) formed groups to create standards. ANSI produced USA Standard COBOL X3.23 in August 1968, which became the cornerstone for later versions.[78] This version was known as American National Standard (ANS) COBOL and was adopted by ISO in 1972.[79]

COBOL-74 edit

By 1970, COBOL had become the most widely used programming language in the world.[80]

Independently of the ANSI committee, the CODASYL Programming Language Committee was working on improving the language. They described new versions in 1968, 1969, 1970 and 1973, including changes such as new inter-program communication, debugging and file merging facilities as well as improved string-handling and library inclusion features.[81]

Although CODASYL was independent of the ANSI committee, the CODASYL Journal of Development was used by ANSI to identify features that were popular enough to warrant implementing.[82] The Programming Language Committee also liaised with ECMA and the Japanese COBOL Standard committee.[81]

The Programming Language Committee was not well-known, however. The vice-president, William Rinehuls, complained that two-thirds of the COBOL community did not know of the committee's existence. It also lacked the funds to make public documents, such as minutes of meetings and change proposals, freely available.[83]

In 1974, ANSI published a revised version of (ANS) COBOL, containing new features such as file organizations, the DELETE statement[84] and the segmentation module.[85] Deleted features included the NOTE statement, the EXAMINE statement (which was replaced by INSPECT) and the implementer-defined random access module (which was superseded by the new sequential and relative I/O modules). These made up 44 changes, which rendered existing statements incompatible with the new standard.[86] The report writer was slated to be removed from COBOL, but was reinstated before the standard was published.[87][88] ISO later adopted the updated standard in 1978.[79]

COBOL-85 edit

In June 1978, work began on revising COBOL-74. The proposed standard (commonly called COBOL-80) differed significantly from the previous one, causing concerns about incompatibility and conversion costs. In January 1981, Joseph T. Brophy, Senior Vice-president of Travelers Insurance, threatened to sue the standard committee because it was not upwards compatible with COBOL-74. Mr. Brophy described previous conversions of their 40-million-line code base as "non-productive" and a "complete waste of our programmer resources".[89] Later that year, the Data Processing Management Association (DPMA) said it was "strongly opposed" to the new standard, citing "prohibitive" conversion costs and enhancements that were "forced on the user".[90][91]

During the first public review period, the committee received 2,200 responses, of which 1,700 were negative form letters.[92] Other responses were detailed analyses of the effect COBOL-80 would have on their systems; conversion costs were predicted to be at least 50 cents per line of code. Fewer than a dozen of the responses were in favor of the proposed standard.[93]

ISO TC97-SC5 installed in 1979 the international COBOL Experts Group, on initiative of Wim Ebbinkhuijsen. The group consisted of COBOL experts from many countries, including the United States. Its goal was to achieve mutual understanding and respect between ANSI and the rest of the world with regard to the need of new COBOL features. After three years, ISO changed the status of the group to a formal Working Group: WG 4 COBOL. The group took primary ownership and development of the COBOL standard, where ANSI made most of the proposals.

In 1983, the DPMA withdrew its opposition to the standard, citing the responsiveness of the committee to public concerns. In the same year, a National Bureau of Standards study concluded that the proposed standard would present few problems.[91][94] A year later, DEC released a VAX/VMS COBOL-80, and noted that conversion of COBOL-74 programs posed few problems. The new EVALUATE statement and inline PERFORM were particularly well received and improved productivity, thanks to simplified control flow and debugging.[95]

The second public review drew another 1,000 (mainly negative) responses, while the last drew just 25, by which time many concerns had been addressed.[91]

In 1985, the ISO Working Group 4 accepted the then-version of the ANSI proposed standard, made several changes and set it as the new ISO standard COBOL 85. It was published in late 1985.

Sixty features were changed or deprecated and 115[96] were added, such as:[97][98]

  • Scope terminators (END-IF, END-PERFORM, END-READ, etc.)
  • Nested subprograms
  • CONTINUE, a no-operation statement
  • EVALUATE, a switch statement
  • INITIALIZE, a statement that can set groups of data to their default values
  • Inline PERFORM loop bodies – previously, loop bodies had to be specified in a separate procedure
  • Reference modification, which allows access to substrings
  • I/O status codes.

The new standard was adopted by all national standard bodies, including ANSI.[79]

Two amendments followed in 1989 and 1993. The first amendment introduced intrinsic functions and the other provided corrections.[79]

COBOL 2002 and object-oriented COBOL edit

In 1997, Gartner Group estimated that there were a total of 200 billion lines of COBOL in existence, which ran 80% of all business programs.[c][99]

In the early 1990s, work began on adding object-orientation in the next full revision of COBOL. Object-oriented features were taken from C++ and Smalltalk.[2][3]

The initial estimate was to have this revision completed by 1997, and an ISO Committee Draft (CD) was available by 1997. Some vendors (including Micro Focus, Fujitsu, and IBM) introduced object-oriented syntax based on drafts of the full revision. The final approved ISO standard was approved and published in late 2002.[100]

Fujitsu/GTSoftware,[101] Micro Focus introduced object-oriented COBOL compilers targeting the .NET Framework.

There were many other new features, many of which had been in the CODASYL COBOL Journal of Development since 1978 and had missed the opportunity to be included in COBOL-85.[102] These other features included:[103][104]

Three corrigenda were published for the standard: two in 2006 and one in 2009.[105]

COBOL 2014 edit

Between 2003 and 2009, three technical reports were produced describing object finalization, XML processing and collection classes for COBOL.[105]

COBOL 2002 suffered from poor support: no compilers completely supported the standard. Micro Focus found that it was due to a lack of user demand for the new features and due to the abolition of the NIST test suite, which had been used to test compiler conformance. The standardization process was also found to be slow and under-resourced.[106]

COBOL 2014 includes the following changes:[107]

  • Portable arithmetic results have been replaced by IEEE 754 data types
  • Major features have been made optional, such as the VALIDATE facility, the report writer and the screen-handling facility
  • Method overloading
  • Dynamic capacity tables (a feature dropped from the draft of COBOL 2002)[108]

COBOL 2023 edit

The COBOL 2023 standard added a few new features:

There is as yet no known complete implementation of this standard.[citation needed]

Legacy edit

COBOL programs are used globally in governments and businesses and are running on diverse operating systems such as z/OS, z/VSE, VME, Unix, NonStop OS, OpenVMS and Windows. In 1997, the Gartner Group reported that 80% of the world's business ran on COBOL with over 200 billion lines of code[c] and 5 billion lines more being written annually.[113]

Near the end of the 20th century, the year 2000 problem (Y2K) was the focus of significant COBOL programming effort, sometimes by the same programmers who had designed the systems decades before. 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.[114] Some studies attribute as much as "24% of Y2K software repair costs to Cobol".[115] After the clean-up effort put into these programs for Y2K, a 2003 survey found that many remained in use.[116] The authors said that the survey data suggest "a gradual decline in the importance of COBOL in application development over the [following] 10 years unless ... integration with other languages and technologies can be adopted".[117]

In 2006 and 2012, Computerworld surveys (of 352 readers) found that over 60% of organizations used COBOL (more than C++ and Visual Basic .NET) and that for half of those, COBOL was used for the majority of their internal software.[9][118] 36% of managers said they planned to migrate from COBOL, and 25% said that they would do so if not for the expense of rewriting legacy code. Alternatively, some businesses have migrated their COBOL programs from mainframes to cheaper, faster hardware.[9]

Testimony before the House of Representatives in 2016 indicated that COBOL is still in use by many federal agencies.[119] Reuters reported in 2017 that 43% of banking systems still used COBOL with over 220 billion lines of COBOL code in use.[120]

By 2019, the number of COBOL programmers was shrinking fast due to retirements, leading to an impending skills gap in business and government organizations which still use mainframe systems for high-volume transaction processing. Efforts to rewrite systems in newer languages have proven expensive and problematic, as has the outsourcing of code maintenance, thus proposals to train more people in COBOL are advocated.[121]

During the COVID-19 pandemic and the ensuing surge of unemployment, several US states reported a shortage of skilled COBOL programmers to support the legacy systems used for unemployment benefit management. Many of these systems had been in the process of conversion to more modern programming languages prior to the pandemic, but the process was put on hold.[122] 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.[123]

Features edit

Syntax edit

COBOL has an English-like syntax, which is used to describe nearly everything in a program. For example, a condition can be expressed as  x IS GREATER THAN y or more concisely as  x GREATER y  or  x > y. More complex conditions can be abbreviated by removing repeated conditions and variables. For example,  a > b AND a > c OR a = d  can be shortened to a > b AND c OR = d. To support this syntax, COBOL has over 300 keywords.[124][d] Some of the keywords are simple alternative or pluralized spellings of the same word, which provides for more grammatically appropriate statements and clauses; e.g., the IN and OF keywords can be used interchangeably, as can TIME and TIMES, and VALUE and VALUES.

Each COBOL program is made up of four basic lexical items: words, literals, picture character-strings (see § PICTURE clause) and separators. Words include reserved words and user-defined identifiers. They are up to 31 characters long and may include letters, digits, hyphens and underscores. Literals include numerals (e.g. 12) and strings (e.g. 'Hello!').[126] Separators include the space character and commas and semi-colons followed by a space.[127]

A COBOL program is split into four divisions: the identification division, the environment division, the data division and the procedure division. The identification division specifies the name and type of the source element and is where classes and interfaces are specified. The environment division specifies any program features that depend on the system running it, such as files and character sets. The data division is used to declare variables and parameters. The procedure division contains the program's statements. Each division is sub-divided into sections, which are made up of paragraphs.

Metalanguage edit

COBOL's syntax is usually described with a unique metalanguage using braces, brackets, bars and underlining. The metalanguage was developed for the original COBOL specifications. Although Backus–Naur form did exist at the time, the committee had not heard of it.[128]

Elements of COBOL's metalanguage
Element Appearance Function
All capitals EXAMPLE Reserved word
Underlining EXAMPLE The reserved word is compulsory
Braces { } Only one option may be selected
Brackets [] Zero or one options may be selected
Ellipsis ... The preceding element may be repeated
Bars {| |} One or more options may be selected. Any option may only be selected once.
[| |] Zero or more options may be selected. Any option may only be selected once.

As an example, consider the following description of an ADD statement: 

  

This description permits the following variants: 

ADD 1 TO x ADD 1, a, b TO x ROUNDED, y, z ROUNDED ADD a, b TO c  ON SIZE ERROR   DISPLAY "Error" END-ADD ADD a TO b  NOT SIZE ERROR   DISPLAY "No error"  ON SIZE ERROR   DISPLAY "Error"

Code format edit

 
COBOL program deck of punched cards, from the 1970s

The height of COBOL's popularity coincided with the era of keypunch machines and punched cards. The program itself was written onto punched cards, then read in and compiled, and the data fed into the program was sometimes on cards as well.[129]

COBOL can be written in two formats: fixed (the default) or free. In fixed-format, code must be aligned to fit in certain areas (a hold-over from using punched cards). Until COBOL 2002, these were:

Name Column(s) Usage
Sequence number area 1–6 Originally used for card/line numbers (facilitating mechanical punched card sorting to assure intended program code sequence after manual editing/handling), this area is ignored by the compiler
Indicator area 7 The following characters are allowed here:
  • * – Comment line
  • / – Comment line that will be printed on a new page of a source listing
  • - – Continuation line, where words or literals from the previous line are continued
  • D – Line enabled in debugging mode, which is otherwise ignored
Area A 8–11 This contains: DIVISION, SECTION and procedure headers; 01 and 77 level numbers and file/report descriptors
Area B 12–72 Any other code not allowed in Area A
Program name area 73– Historically up to column 80 for punched cards, it is used to identify the program or sequence the card belongs to

In COBOL 2002, Areas A and B were merged to form the program-text area, which now ends at an implementor-defined column.[130]

COBOL 2002 also introduced free-format code. Free-format code can be placed in any column of the file, as in newer programming languages. Comments are specified using *>, which can be placed anywhere and can also be used in fixed-format source code. Continuation lines are not present, and the >>PAGE directive replaces the / indicator.[130]

Identification division edit

The identification division identifies the following code entity and contains the definition of a class or interface.

Object-oriented programming edit

Classes and interfaces have been in COBOL since 2002. Classes have factory objects, containing class methods and variables, and instance objects, containing instance methods and variables.[131] Inheritance and interfaces provide polymorphism. Support for generic programming is provided through parameterized classes, which can be instantiated to use any class or interface. Objects are stored as references which may be restricted to a certain type. There are two ways of calling a method: the INVOKE statement, which acts similarly to CALL, or through inline method invocation, which is analogous to using functions.[132] 

*> These are equivalent. INVOKE my-class "foo" RETURNING var MOVE my-class::"foo" TO var *> Inline method invocation

COBOL does not provide a way to hide methods. Class data can be hidden, however, by declaring it without a PROPERTY clause, which leaves external code no way to access it.[133] Method overloading was added in COBOL 2014.[134]

Environment division edit

The environment division contains the configuration section and the input-output section. The configuration section is used to specify variable features such as currency signs, locales and character sets. The input-output section contains file-related information.

Files edit

COBOL supports three file formats, or organizations: sequential, indexed and relative. In sequential files, records are contiguous and must be traversed sequentially, similarly to a linked list. Indexed files have one or more indexes which allow records to be randomly accessed and which can be sorted on them. Each record must have a unique key, but other, alternate, record keys need not be unique. Implementations of indexed files vary between vendors, although common implementations, such as C-ISAM and VSAM, are based on IBM's ISAM. other implementations are Record Management Services on OpenVMS and Enscribe on HPE NonStop (Tandem). Relative files, like indexed files, have a unique record key, but they do not have alternate keys. A relative record's key is its ordinal position; for example, the 10th record has a key of 10. This means that creating a record with a key of 5 may require the creation of (empty) preceding records. Relative files also allow for both sequential and random access.[135]

A common non-standard extension is the line sequential organization, used to process text files. Records in a file are terminated by a newline and may be of varying length.[136]

Data division edit

The data division is split into six sections which declare different items: the file section, for file records; the working-storage section, for static variables; the local-storage section, for automatic variables; the linkage section, for parameters and the return value; the report section and the screen section, for text-based user interfaces.

Aggregated data edit

Data items in COBOL are declared hierarchically through the use of level-numbers which indicate if a data item is part of another. An item with a higher level-number is subordinate to an item with a lower one. Top-level data items, with a level-number of 1, are called records. Items that have subordinate aggregate data are called group items; those that do not are called elementary items. Level-numbers used to describe standard data items are between 1 and 49.[137][138] 

  01 some-record.  *> Aggregate group record item   05 num PIC 9(10). *> Elementary item   05 the-date.  *> Aggregate (sub)group record item   10 the-year PIC 9(4). *> Elementary item   10 the-month PIC 99. *> Elementary item   10 the-day PIC 99. *> Elementary item

In the above example, elementary item num and group item the-date are subordinate to the record some-record, while elementary items the-year, the-month, and the-day are part of the group item the-date.

Subordinate items can be disambiguated with the IN (or OF) keyword. For example, consider the example code above along with the following example: 

  01 sale-date.   05 the-year PIC 9(4).   05 the-month PIC 99.   05 the-day PIC 99.

The names the-year, the-month, and the-day are ambiguous by themselves, since more than one data item is defined with those names. To specify a particular data item, for instance one of the items contained within the sale-date group, the programmer would use the-year IN sale-date (or the equivalent the-year OF sale-date). This syntax is similar to the "dot notation" supported by most contemporary languages.

Other data levels edit

A level-number of 66 is used to declare a re-grouping of previously defined items, irrespective of how those items are structured. This data level, also referred to by the associated RENAMES clause, is rarely used[139] and, circa 1988, was usually found in old programs. Its ability to ignore the hierarchical and logical structure data meant its use was not recommended and many installations forbade its use.[140] 

  01 customer-record.   05 cust-key PIC X(10).   05 cust-name.   10 cust-first-name PIC X(30).   10 cust-last-name PIC X(30).   05 cust-dob PIC 9(8).   05 cust-balance PIC 9(7)V99.      66 cust-personal-details RENAMES cust-name THRU cust-dob.   66 cust-all-details RENAMES cust-name THRU cust-balance.

A 77 level-number indicates the item is stand-alone, and in such situations is equivalent to the level-number 01. For example, the following code declares two 77-level data items, property-name and sales-region, which are non-group data items that are independent of (not subordinate to) any other data items: 

  77 property-name PIC X(80).   77 sales-region PIC 9(5).

An 88 level-number declares a condition name (a so-called 88-level) which is true when its parent data item contains one of the values specified in its VALUE clause.[141] For example, the following code defines two 88-level condition-name items that are true or false depending on the current character data value of the wage-type data item. When the data item contains a value of 'H', the condition-name wage-is-hourly is true, whereas when it contains a value of 'S' or 'Y', the condition-name wage-is-yearly is true. If the data item contains some other value, both of the condition-names are false. 

  01 wage-type PIC X.   88 wage-is-hourly VALUE "H".   88 wage-is-yearly VALUE "S", "Y".

Data types edit

Standard COBOL provides the following data types:[142]

Data type Sample declaration Notes
Alphabetic PIC A(30) May contain only letters or spaces.
Alphanumeric PIC X(30) May contain any characters.
Boolean PIC 1 USAGE BIT Data stored in the form of 0s and 1s, as a binary number.
Index USAGE INDEX Used to reference table elements.
National PIC N(30) Similar to alphanumeric, but using an extended character set, e.g. UTF-8.
Numeric PIC 9(5)V9(2) Contains exactly 7 digits (7=5+2). 'V' locates the implicit decimal in a fixed point number.
Object USAGE OBJECT REFERENCE May reference either an object or NULL.
Pointer USAGE POINTER

Type safety is variable in COBOL. Numeric data is converted between different representations and sizes silently and alphanumeric data can be placed in any data item that can be stored as a string, including numeric and group data.[143] In contrast, object references and pointers may only be assigned from items of the same type and their values may be restricted to a certain type.[144]

PICTURE clause edit

A PICTURE (or PIC) clause is a string of characters, each of which represents a portion of the data item and what it may contain. Some picture characters specify the type of the item and how many characters or digits it occupies in memory. For example, a 9 indicates a decimal digit, and an S indicates that the item is signed. Other picture characters (called insertion and editing characters) specify how an item should be formatted. For example, a series of + characters define character positions as well as how a leading sign character is to be positioned within the final character data; the rightmost non-numeric character will contain the item's sign, while other character positions corresponding to a + to the left of this position will contain a space. Repeated characters can be specified more concisely by specifying a number in parentheses after a picture character; for example, 9(7) is equivalent to 9999999. Picture specifications containing only digit (9) and sign (S) characters define purely numeric data items, while picture specifications containing alphabetic (A) or alphanumeric (X) characters define alphanumeric data items. The presence of other formatting characters define edited numeric or edited alphanumeric data items.[145]

Examples
PICTURE clause Value in Value out
PIC 9(5) 100 00100
"Hello" "Hello" (this is legal, but results in undefined behavior)[143]
PIC +++++ -10 "  -10" (note leading spaces)
PIC 99/99/9(4) 30042003 "30/04/2003"
PIC *(4)9.99 100.50 "**100.50"
0 "****0.00"
PIC X(3)BX(3)BX(3) "ABCDEFGHI" "ABC DEF GHI"
USAGE clause edit

The USAGE clause declares the format in which data is stored. Depending on the data type, it can either complement or be used instead of a PICTURE clause. While it can be used to declare pointers and object references, it is mostly geared towards specifying numeric types. These numeric formats are:[146]

  • Binary, where a minimum size is either specified by the PICTURE clause or by a USAGE clause such as BINARY-LONG
  • USAGE COMPUTATIONAL, where data may be stored in whatever format the implementation provides; often equivalent to  USAGE BINARY
  • USAGE DISPLAY, the default format, where data is stored as a string
  • Floating-point, in either an implementation-dependent format or according to IEEE 754
  • USAGE NATIONAL, where data is stored as a string using an extended character set
  • USAGE PACKED-DECIMAL, where data is stored in the smallest possible decimal format (typically packed binary-coded decimal)

Report writer edit

The report writer is a declarative facility for creating reports. The programmer need only specify the report layout and the data required to produce it, freeing them from having to write code to handle things like page breaks, data formatting, and headings and footings.[147]

Reports are associated with report files, which are files which may only be written to through report writer statements. 

  FD  report-out REPORT sales-report.

Each report is defined in the report section of the data division. A report is split into report groups which define the report's headings, footings and details. Reports work around hierarchical control breaks. Control breaks occur when a key variable changes it value; for example, when creating a report detailing customers' orders, a control break could occur when the program reaches a different customer's orders. Here is an example report description for a report which gives a salesperson's sales and which warns of any invalid records: 

  RD  sales-report   PAGE LIMITS 60 LINES   FIRST DETAIL 3   CONTROLS seller-name.   01 TYPE PAGE HEADING.   03 COL 1  VALUE "Sales Report".   03 COL 74  VALUE "Page".   03 COL 79  PIC Z9 SOURCE PAGE-COUNTER.   01 sales-on-day TYPE DETAIL, LINE + 1.   03 COL 3  VALUE "Sales on".   03 COL 12  PIC 99/99/9999 SOURCE sales-date.   03 COL 21  VALUE "were".   03 COL 26  PIC $$$$9.99 SOURCE sales-amount.   01 invalid-sales TYPE DETAIL, LINE + 1.   03 COL 3  VALUE "INVALID RECORD:".   03 COL 19  PIC X(34) SOURCE sales-record.   01 TYPE CONTROL HEADING seller-name, LINE + 2.   03 COL 1  VALUE "Seller:".   03 COL 9  PIC X(30) SOURCE seller-name.

The above report description describes the following layout: 

Sales Report      Page 1 Seller: Howard Bromberg Sales on 10/12/2008 were $1000.00 Sales on 12/12/2008 were $0.00 Sales on 13/12/2008 were $31.47 INVALID RECORD: Howard Bromberg  XXXXYY Seller: Howard Discount ... Sales Report     Page 12 Sales on 08/05/2014 were $543.98 INVALID RECORD: William Selden 12O52014FOOFOO Sales on 30/05/2014 were $0.00

Four statements control the report writer: INITIATE, which prepares the report writer for printing; GENERATE, which prints a report group; SUPPRESS, which suppresses the printing of a report group; and TERMINATE, which terminates report processing. For the above sales report example, the procedure division might look like this: 

  OPEN INPUT sales, OUTPUT report-out   INITIATE sales-report     PERFORM UNTIL 1 <> 1   READ sales    AT END    EXIT PERFORM    END-READ      VALIDATE sales-record   IF valid-record    GENERATE sales-on-day   ELSE    GENERATE invalid-sales   END-IF   END-PERFORM     TERMINATE sales-report   CLOSE sales, report-out   .

Use of the Report Writer facility tends to vary considerably; some organizations use it extensively and some not at all.[148] In addition, implementations of Report Writer ranged in quality, with those at the lower end sometimes using excessive amounts of memory at runtime.[148]

Procedure division edit

Procedures edit

The sections and paragraphs in the procedure division (collectively called procedures) can be used as labels and as simple subroutines. Unlike in other divisions, paragraphs do not need to be in sections.[149]

Execution goes down through the procedures of a program until it is terminated.[150] To use procedures as subroutines, the PERFORM verb is used.

A PERFORM statement somewhat resembles a procedure call in a newer languages in the sense that execution returns to the code following the PERFORM statement at the end of the called code; however, it does not provide a mechanism for parameter passing or for returning a result value. If a subroutine is invoked using a simple statement like PERFORM subroutine, then control returns at the end of the called procedure. However, PERFORM is unusual in that it may be used to call a range spanning a sequence of several adjacent procedures. This is done with the PERFORM sub-1 THRU sub-n construct: 

PROCEDURE so-and-so.  PERFORM ALPHA  PERFORM ALPHA THRU GAMMA  STOP RUN. ALPHA.  DISPLAY 'A'. BETA.  DISPLAY 'B'. GAMMA.  DISPLAY 'C'.

The output of this program will be: "A A B C".

PERFORM also differs from conventional procedure calls in that there is, at least traditionally, no notion of a call stack. As a consequence, nested invocations are possible (a sequence of code being PERFORM'ed may execute a PERFORM statement itself), but require extra care if parts of the same code are executed by both invocations. The problem arises when the code in the inner invocation reaches the exit point of the outer invocation. More formally, if control passes through the exit point of a PERFORM invocation that was called earlier but has not yet completed, the COBOL 2002 standard stipulates that the behavior is undefined.

The reason is that COBOL, rather than a "return address", operates with what may be called a continuation address. When control flow reaches the end of any procedure, the continuation address is looked up and control is transferred to that address. Before the program runs, the continuation address for every procedure is initialized to the start address of the procedure that comes next in the program text so that, if no PERFORM statements happen, control flows from top to bottom through the program. But when a PERFORM statement executes, it modifies the continuation address of the called procedure (or the last procedure of the called range, if PERFORM THRU was used), so that control will return to the call site at the end. The original value is saved and is restored afterwards, but there is only one storage position. If two nested invocations operate on overlapping code, they may interfere which each other's management of the continuation address in several ways.[151][152]

The following example (taken from Veerman & Verhoeven 2006) illustrates the problem: 

LABEL1.  DISPLAY '1'  PERFORM LABEL2 THRU LABEL3  STOP RUN. LABEL2.  DISPLAY '2'  PERFORM LABEL3 THRU LABEL4. LABEL3.  DISPLAY '3'. LABEL4.  DISPLAY '4'.

One might expect that the output of this program would be "1 2 3 4 3": After displaying "2", the second PERFORM causes "3" and "4" to be displayed, and then the first invocation continues on with "3". In traditional COBOL implementations, this is not the case. Rather, the first PERFORM statement sets the continuation address at the end of LABEL3 so that it will jump back to the call site inside LABEL1. The second PERFORM statement sets the return at the end of LABEL4 but does not modify the continuation address of LABEL3, expecting it to be the default continuation. Thus, when the inner invocation arrives at the end of LABEL3, it jumps back to the outer PERFORM statement, and the program stops having printed just "1 2 3". On the other hand, in some COBOL implementations like the open-source TinyCOBOL compiler, the two PERFORM statements do not interfere with each other and the output is indeed "1 2 3 4 3". Therefore, the behavior in such cases is not only (perhaps) surprising, it is also not portable.[152]

A special consequence of this limitation is that PERFORM cannot be used to write recursive code. Another simple example to illustrate this (slightly simplified from Veerman & Verhoeven 2006): 

 MOVE 1 TO A  PERFORM LABEL   STOP RUN. LABEL.  DISPLAY A  IF A < 3  ADD 1 TO A  PERFORM LABEL   END-IF   DISPLAY 'END'.

One might expect that the output is "1 2 3 END END END", and in fact that is what some COBOL compilers will produce. But other compilers, like IBM COBOL, will produce code that prints "1 2 3 END END END END ..." and so on, printing "END" over and over in an endless loop. Since there is limited space to store backup continuation addresses, the backups get overwritten in the course of recursive invocations, and all that can be restored is the jump back to DISPLAY 'END'.[152]

Statements edit

COBOL 2014 has 47 statements (also called verbs),[153] which can be grouped into the following broad categories: control flow, I/O, data manipulation and the report writer. The report writer statements are covered in the report writer section.

Control flow edit

COBOL's conditional statements are IF and EVALUATE. EVALUATE is a switch-like statement with the added capability of evaluating multiple values and conditions. This can be used to implement decision tables. For example, the following might be used to control a CNC lathe: 

EVALUATE TRUE ALSO desired-speed ALSO current-speed  WHEN lid-closed ALSO min-speed THRU max-speed ALSO LESS THAN desired-speed  PERFORM speed-up-machine  WHEN lid-closed ALSO min-speed THRU max-speed ALSO GREATER THAN desired-speed  PERFORM slow-down-machine  WHEN lid-open ALSO ANY ALSO NOT ZERO   PERFORM emergency-stop  WHEN OTHER   CONTINUE END-EVALUATE

The PERFORM statement is used to define loops which are executed until a condition is true (not while true, which is more common in other languages). It is also used to call procedures or ranges of procedures (see the procedures section for more details). CALL and INVOKE call subprograms and methods, respectively. The name of the subprogram/method is contained in a string which may be a literal or a data item.[154] Parameters can be passed by reference, by content (where a copy is passed by reference) or by value (but only if a prototype is available).[155] CANCEL unloads subprograms from memory. GO TO causes the program to jump to a specified procedure.

The GOBACK statement is a return statement and the STOP statement stops the program. The EXIT statement has six different formats: it can be used as a return statement, a break statement, a continue statement, an end marker or to leave a procedure.[156]

Exceptions are raised by a RAISE statement and caught with a handler, or declarative, defined in the DECLARATIVES portion of the procedure division. Declaratives are sections beginning with a USE statement which specify the errors to handle. Exceptions can be names or objects. RESUME is used in a declarative to jump to the statement after the one that raised the exception or to a procedure outside the DECLARATIVES. Unlike other languages, uncaught exceptions may not terminate the program and the program can proceed unaffected.

I/O edit

File I/O is handled by the self-describing OPEN, CLOSE, READ, and WRITE statements along with a further three: REWRITE, which updates a record; START, which selects subsequent records to access by finding a record with a certain key; and UNLOCK, which releases a lock on the last record accessed.

User interaction is done using ACCEPT and DISPLAY.

Data manipulation edit

The following verbs manipulate data:

  • INITIALIZE, which sets data items to their default values.
  • MOVE, which assigns values to data items ; MOVE CORRESPONDING assigns corresponding like-named fields.
  • SET, which has 15 formats: it can modify indices, assign object references and alter table capacities, among other functions.[157]
  • ADD, SUBTRACT, MULTIPLY, DIVIDE, and COMPUTE, which handle arithmetic (with COMPUTE assigning the result of a formula to a variable).
  • ALLOCATE and FREE, which handle dynamic memory.
  • VALIDATE, which validates and distributes data as specified in an item's description in the data division.
  • STRING and UNSTRING, which concatenate and split strings, respectively.
  • INSPECT, which tallies or replaces instances of specified substrings within a string.
  • SEARCH, which searches a table for the first entry satisfying a condition.

Files and tables are sorted using SORT and the MERGE verb merges and sorts files. The RELEASE verb provides records to sort and RETURN retrieves sorted records in order.

Scope termination edit

Some statements, such as IF and READ, may themselves contain statements. Such statements may be terminated in two ways: by a period (implicit termination), which terminates all unterminated statements contained, or by a scope terminator, which terminates the nearest matching open statement. 

*> Terminator period ("implicit termination") IF invalid-record  IF no-more-records  NEXT SENTENCE   ELSE   READ record-file  AT END SET no-more-records TO TRUE. *> Scope terminators ("explicit termination") IF invalid-record  IF no-more-records  CONTINUE   ELSE   READ record-file  AT END SET no-more-records TO TRUE   END-READ   END-IF END-IF

Nested statements terminated with a period are a common source of bugs.[158][159] For example, examine the following code: 

IF x  DISPLAY y.  DISPLAY z.

Here, the intent is to display y and z if condition x is true. However, z will be displayed whatever the value of x because the IF statement is terminated by an erroneous period after DISPLAY y.

Another bug is a result of the dangling else problem, when two IF statements can associate with an ELSE. 

IF x  IF y  DISPLAY a ELSE   DISPLAY b.

In the above fragment, the ELSE associates with the  IF y  statement instead of the  IF x  statement, causing a bug. Prior to the introduction of explicit scope terminators, preventing it would require  ELSE NEXT SENTENCE  to be placed after the inner IF.[159]

Self-modifying code edit

The original (1959) COBOL specification supported the infamous  ALTER X TO PROCEED TO Y  statement, for which many compilers generated self-modifying code. X and Y are procedure labels, and the single  GO TO  statement in procedure X executed after such an ALTER statement means  GO TO Y  instead. Many compilers still support it,[160] but it was deemed obsolete in the COBOL 1985 standard and deleted in 2002.[161]

The ALTER statement was poorly regarded because it undermined "locality of context" and made a program's overall logic difficult to comprehend.[162] As textbook author Daniel D. McCracken wrote in 1976, when "someone who has never seen the program before must become familiar with it as quickly as possible, sometimes under critical time pressure because the program has failed ... the sight of a GO TO statement in a paragraph by itself, signaling as it does the existence of an unknown number of ALTER statements at unknown locations throughout the program, strikes fear in the heart of the bravest programmer."[162]

Hello, world edit

A "Hello, World!" program in COBOL: 

  IDENTIFICATION DIVISION.   PROGRAM-ID. hello-world.   PROCEDURE DIVISION.   DISPLAY "Hello, world!"   .

When the now famous "Hello, World!" program example in The C Programming Language was first published in 1978 a similar mainframe COBOL program sample would have been submitted through JCL, very likely using a punch card reader, and 80 column punch cards. The listing below, with an empty DATA DIVISION, was tested using Linux and the System/370 Hercules emulator running MVS 3.8J. The JCL, written in July 2015, is derived from the Hercules tutorials and samples hosted by Jay Moseley.[163] In keeping with COBOL programming of that era, HELLO, WORLD is displayed in all capital letters. 

//COBUCLG JOB (001),'COBOL BASE TEST',   00010000 //  CLASS=A,MSGCLASS=A,MSGLEVEL=(1,1)  00020000 //BASETEST EXEC COBUCLG     00030000 //COB.SYSIN DD *     00040000  00000* VALIDATION OF BASE COBOL INSTALL   00050000  01000 IDENTIFICATION DIVISION.    00060000  01100 PROGRAM-ID. 'HELLO'.    00070000  02000 ENVIRONMENT DIVISION.    00080000  02100 CONFIGURATION SECTION.    00090000  02110 SOURCE-COMPUTER. GNULINUX.    00100000  02120 OBJECT-COMPUTER. HERCULES.    00110000  02200 SPECIAL-NAMES.     00120000  02210 CONSOLE IS CONSL.    00130000  03000 DATA DIVISION.     00140000  04000 PROCEDURE DIVISION.    00150000  04100 00-MAIN.     00160000  04110 DISPLAY 'HELLO, WORLD' UPON CONSL.   00170000  04900 STOP RUN.     00180000 //LKED.SYSLIB DD DSNAME=SYS1.COBLIB,DISP=SHR   00190000 // DD DSNAME=SYS1.LINKLIB,DISP=SHR   00200000 //GO.SYSPRINT DD SYSOUT=A     00210000 //      00220000

After submitting the JCL, the MVS console displayed: 

 19.52.48 JOB 3 $HASP100 COBUCLG ON READER1 COBOL BASE TEST 19.52.48 JOB 3 IEF677I WARNING MESSAGE(S) FOR JOB COBUCLG ISSUED 19.52.48 JOB 3 $HASP373 COBUCLG STARTED - INIT 1 - CLASS A - SYS BSP1 19.52.48 JOB 3 IEC130I SYSPUNCH DD STATEMENT MISSING 19.52.48 JOB 3 IEC130I SYSLIB DD STATEMENT MISSING 19.52.48 JOB 3 IEC130I SYSPUNCH DD STATEMENT MISSING 19.52.48 JOB 3 IEFACTRT - Stepname Procstep Program Retcode 19.52.48 JOB 3 COBUCLG BASETEST COB IKFCBL00 RC= 0000 19.52.48 JOB 3 COBUCLG BASETEST LKED IEWL RC= 0000  19.52.48 JOB 3 +HELLO, WORLD  19.52.48 JOB 3 COBUCLG BASETEST GO PGM=*.DD RC= 0000 19.52.48 JOB 3 $HASP395 COBUCLG ENDED

Line 10 of the console listing above is highlighted for effect, the highlighting is not part of the actual console output.

The associated compiler listing generated over four pages of technical detail and job run information, for the single line of output from the 14 lines of COBOL.

Reception edit

Lack of structure edit

In the 1970s, adoption of the structured programming paradigm was becoming increasingly widespread. Edsger Dijkstra, a preeminent computer scientist, wrote a letter to the editor of Communications of the ACM, published in 1975 entitled "How do we tell truths that might hurt?", in which he was critical of COBOL and several other contemporary languages; remarking that "the use of COBOL cripples the mind".[164]

In a published dissent to Dijkstra's remarks, the computer scientist Howard E. Tompkins claimed that unstructured COBOL tended to be "written by programmers that have never had the benefit of structured COBOL taught well", arguing that the issue was primarily one of training.[165]

One cause of spaghetti code was the GO TO statement. Attempts to remove GO TOs from COBOL code, however, resulted in convoluted programs and reduced code quality.[166] GO TOs were largely replaced by the PERFORM statement and procedures, which promoted modular programming[166] and gave easy access to powerful looping facilities. However, PERFORM could be used only with procedures so loop bodies were not located where they were used, making programs harder to understand.[167]

COBOL programs were infamous for being monolithic and lacking modularization.[168] COBOL code could be modularized only through procedures, which were found to be inadequate for large systems. It was impossible to restrict access to data, meaning a procedure could access and modify any data item. Furthermore, there was no way to pass parameters to a procedure, an omission Jean Sammet regarded as the committee's biggest mistake.[169]

Another complication stemmed from the ability to PERFORM THRU a specified sequence of procedures. This meant that control could jump to and return from any procedure, creating convoluted control flow and permitting a programmer to break the single-entry single-exit rule.[170]

This situation improved as COBOL adopted more features. COBOL-74 added subprograms, giving programmers the ability to control the data each part of the program could access. COBOL-85 then added nested subprograms, allowing programmers to hide subprograms.[171] Further control over data and code came in 2002 when object-oriented programming, user-defined functions and user-defined data types were included.

Nevertheless, much important legacy COBOL software uses unstructured code, which has become practically unmaintainable. It can be too risky and costly to modify even a simple section of code, since it may be used from unknown places in unknown ways.[172]

Compatibility issues edit

COBOL was intended to be a highly portable, "common" language. However, by 2001, around 300 dialects had been created.[173] One source of dialects was the standard itself: the 1974 standard was composed of one mandatory nucleus and eleven functional modules, each containing two or three levels of support. This permitted 104,976 possible variants.[174]

COBOL-85 was not fully compatible with earlier versions, and its development was controversial. Joseph T. Brophy, the CIO of Travelers Insurance, spearheaded an effort to inform COBOL users of the heavy reprogramming costs of implementing the new standard.[175] As a result, the ANSI COBOL Committee received more than 2,200 letters from the public, mostly negative, requiring the committee to make changes. On the other hand, conversion to COBOL-85 was thought to increase productivity in future years, thus justifying the conversion costs.[176]

Verbose syntax edit

COBOL: /koh′bol/, n.

A weak, verbose, and flabby language used by code grinders to do boring mindless things on dinosaur mainframes. [...] Its very name is seldom uttered without ritual expressions of disgust or horror.

The Jargon File 4.4.8.[177]

COBOL syntax has often been criticized for its verbosity. Proponents say that this was intended to make the code self-documenting, easing program maintenance.[178] COBOL was also intended to be easy for programmers to learn and use,[179] while still being readable to non-technical staff such as managers.[180][181][182][183]

The desire for readability led to the use of English-like syntax and structural elements, such as nouns, verbs, clauses, sentences, sections, and divisions. Yet by 1984, maintainers of COBOL programs were struggling to deal with "incomprehensible" code[182] and the main changes in COBOL-85 were there to help ease maintenance.[92]

Jean Sammet, a short-range committee member, noted that "little attempt was made to cater to the professional programmer, in fact people whose main interest is programming tend to be very unhappy with COBOL" which she attributed to COBOL's verbose syntax.[184]

Isolation from the computer science community edit

The COBOL community has always been isolated from the computer science community. No academic computer scientists participated in the design of COBOL: all of those on the committee came from commerce or government. Computer scientists at the time were more interested in fields like numerical analysis, physics and system programming than the commercial file-processing problems which COBOL development tackled.[185] Jean Sammet attributed COBOL's unpopularity to an initial "snob reaction" due to its inelegance, the lack of influential computer scientists participating in the design process and a disdain for business data processing.[186] The COBOL specification used a unique "notation", or metalanguage, to define its syntax rather than the new Backus–Naur form which the committee did not know of. This resulted in "severe" criticism.[187][188][69]

The academic world tends to regard COBOL as verbose, clumsy and inelegant, and tries to ignore it, although there are probably more COBOL programs and programmers in the world than there are for FORTRAN, ALGOL and PL/I combined. For the most part, only schools with an immediate vocational objective provide instruction in COBOL.

Richard Conway and David Gries, 1973[189]

Later, COBOL suffered from a shortage of material covering it; it took until 1963 for introductory books to appear (with Richard D. Irwin publishing a college textbook on COBOL in 1966).[190] By 1985, there were twice as many books on FORTRAN and four times as many on BASIC as on COBOL in the Library of Congress.[128] University professors taught more modern, state-of-the-art languages and techniques instead of COBOL which was said to have a "trade school" nature.[191] Donald Nelson, chair of the CODASYL COBOL committee, said in 1984 that "academics ... hate COBOL" and that computer science graduates "had 'hate COBOL' drilled into them".[192]

By the mid-1980s, there was also significant condescension towards COBOL in the business community from users of other languages, for example FORTRAN or assembler, implying that COBOL could be used only for non-challenging problems.[193]

In 2003, COBOL featured in 80% of information systems curricula in the United States, the same proportion as C++ and Java.[194] Ten years later, a poll by Micro Focus found that 20% of university academics thought COBOL was outdated or dead and that 55% believed their students thought COBOL was outdated or dead. The same poll also found that only 25% of academics had COBOL programming on their curriculum even though 60% thought they should teach it.[195]

Concerns about the design process edit

Doubts have been raised about the competence of the standards committee. Short-term committee member Howard Bromberg said that there was "little control" over the development process and that it was "plagued by discontinuity of personnel and ... a lack of talent."[80] Jean Sammet and Jerome Garfunkel also noted that changes introduced in one revision of the standard would be reverted in the next, due as much to changes in who was in the standard committee as to objective evidence.[196]

COBOL standards have repeatedly suffered from delays: COBOL-85 arrived five years later than hoped,[197] COBOL 2002 was five years late,[2] and COBOL 2014 was six years late.[100][198] To combat delays, the standard committee allowed the creation of optional addenda which would add features more quickly than by waiting for the next standard revision. However, some committee members raised concerns about incompatibilities between implementations and frequent modifications of the standard.[199]

Influences on other languages edit

COBOL's data structures influenced subsequent programming languages. Its record and file structure influenced PL/I and Pascal, and the REDEFINES clause was a predecessor to Pascal's variant records. Explicit file structure definitions preceded the development of database management systems and aggregated data was a significant advance over Fortran's arrays.[128]

PICTURE data declarations were incorporated into PL/I, with minor changes.

COBOL's COPY facility, although considered "primitive",[200] influenced the development of include directives.[128]

The focus on portability and standardization meant programs written in COBOL could be portable and facilitated the spread of the language to a wide variety of hardware platforms and operating systems.[201] Additionally, the well-defined division structure restricts the definition of external references to the Environment Division, which simplifies platform changes in particular.[202]

See also edit

Notes edit

  1. ^ Specifically influenced COBOL 2002's object-oriented features.[2][3][4]
  2. ^ The tombstone is currently at the Computer History Museum.[63]
  3. ^ a b The reader should be cautioned that although the 1997 Gartner Group study is referenced ubiquitously with a famous "200 billion lines of COBOL" quote, the actual report is difficult to find.[203] Moreover, some speculate[204] that "the only involvement of Gartner in these numbers" was the 1995 study[205] which "projected that fixing the Y2K bug would cost $1 per line or $300 billion total," which caused the misinterpretation of the report.
  4. ^ Vendor-specific extensions cause many implementations to have far more: one implementation recognizes over 1,100 keywords.[125]

References edit

Citations edit

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  • Beyer, Kurt (2009). Grace Hopper and the Invention of the Information Age. MIT Press. ISBN 978-0262013109. LCCN 2008044229.
  • Brown, William R. (1 December 1976). "COBOL". In Belzer, Jack; Holzman, Albert G.; Kent, Allen (eds.). Encyclopedia of Computer Science and Technology: Volume 5. CRC Press. ISBN 978-0824722555.
  • Carr, Donald E.; Kizior, Ronald J. (31 December 2003). "Continued Relevance of COBOL in Business and Academia: Current Situation and Comparison to the Year 2000 Study" (PDF). Information Systems Education Journal. 1 (52). ISSN 1545-679X. S2CID 62485945. (PDF) from the original on 5 March 2023. Retrieved 4 August 2014.
  • CODASYL (July 1969). CODASYL COBOL Journal of Development 1968. National Bureau of Standards. ISSN 0591-0218. LCCN 73601243. OL 14204153M.
  • Conner, Richard L. (14 May 1984). "Cobol, your age is showing". Computerworld. 18 (20): ID/7–ID/18. ISSN 0010-4841.
  • Cutler, Gary (9 April 2014). GNU COBOL Programmer's Guide (PDF) (3rd ed.). Retrieved 25 February 2014.
  • Garfunkel, Jerome (1987). The COBOL 85 Example Book. Wiley. ISBN 978-0471804611.
  • ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 22/WG 4 (4 December 2001). . ISO. Archived from the original (ZIP of PDF) on 24 January 2002. Retrieved 2 September 2014. (Link goes to draft N 0147)
  • ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 22/WG 4 (31 October 2014). INCITS/ISO/IEC 1989:2014 [2014] – Programming language COBOL. INCITS.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)
  • ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 22/WG 4 (January 2023). ISO/IEC 1989:2023 – Programming language COBOL. ISO.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)
  • Klein, William M. (4 October 2010). (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 7 January 2014. Retrieved 7 January 2014.
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  • Marcotty, Michael (1978b). Wexelblat, Richard L. (ed.). Full text of all questions submitted. History of Programming Languages. Academic Press (published 1981). p. 274. doi:10.1145/800025.1198371. ISBN 0127450408.
  • McCracken, Daniel D. (1976). A Simplified Guide to Structured COBOL Programming. Wiley. ISBN 0-471-58284-0. LCCN 75044399.
  • McCracken, Daniel D.; Golden, Donald G. (1988). A Simplified Guide to Structured COBOL Programming (2nd ed.). Wiley. ISBN 978-0471610540. LCCN 87034608.
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  • Sammet, Jean E. (May 1961). A method of combining ALGOL and COBOL. Papers presented at the 9–11 May 1961, western joint IRE–AIEE–ACM computer conference. ACM. pp. 379–387. doi:10.1145/1460690.1460734.
  • Sammet, Jean E. (1978a). Wexelblat, Richard L. (ed.). The early history of COBOL. History of Programming Languages. Academic Press (published 1981). doi:10.1145/800025.1198367. ISBN 0127450408.
  • Sammet, Jean E. (1978b). Wexelblat, Richard L. (ed.). Transcript of presentation. History of Programming Languages. Academic Press (published 1981). doi:10.1145/800025.1198368. ISBN 0127450408.
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External links edit

January 01, 1970
cobol, ɔː, acronym, common, business, oriented, language, compiled, english, like, computer, programming, language, designed, business, imperative, procedural, since, 2002, object, oriented, language, primarily, used, business, finance, administrative, systems. COBOL ˈ k oʊ b ɒ l b ɔː l an acronym for common business oriented language is a compiled English like computer programming language designed for business use It is an imperative procedural and since 2002 object oriented language 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 Many large financial institutions were developing new systems in the language as late as 2006 9 but most programming in COBOL today is purely to maintain existing applications Programs are being moved to new platforms rewritten in modern languages or replaced with other software 10 COBOLThe COBOL 60 report to CODASYL April 1960 ParadigmProcedural imperative object oriented genericDesigned byHoward Bromberg Norman Discount Vernon Reeves Jean E Sammet William Selden Gertrude Tierney with indirect influence from Grace Hopper 1 DevelopersCODASYL ANSI ISO IECFirst appeared1959 65 years ago 1959 Stable releaseISO IEC 1989 2023 2023Typing disciplineWeak staticFilename extensions cbl cob cpyMajor implementationsGnuCOBOL IBM COBOL Micro Focus Visual COBOLDialectsCOBOL 2 DEC COBOL 10 DEC PDP 11 COBOL DEC PDP 11 COBOL 85 DEC VAX COBOL DOSVS COBOL Envyr ICOBOL Fujitsu COBOL Hitachi COBOL2002 HP3000 COBOL II IBM COBOL SAA IBM COBOL 400 IBM COBOL II IBM Enterprise COBOL IBM ILE COBOL IBM OS VS COBOL ICL COBOL VME Micro Focus ACUCOBOL GT Micro Focus COBOL IT Micro Focus RM COBOL Micro Focus Visual COBOL Microsoft COBOL Raincode COBOL Realia COBOL Ryan McFarland RM COBOL Ryan McFarland RM COBOL 85 Tandem NonStop COBOL Tandem NonStop SCOBOL UNIVAC COBOL Unisys MCP COBOL74 Unisys MCP COBOL85 Unix COBOL X Open Veryant isCOBOL Wang VS COBOLInfluenced byInitial AIMACO COMTRAN FACT FLOW MATIC COBOL 2002 a C Eiffel SmalltalkInfluencedCobolScript 5 EGL 6 PL I 7 PL B 8 COBOL at Wikibooks COBOL was designed in 1959 by CODASYL and was partly based on the programming language FLOW MATIC designed by Grace Hopper It was created as part of a U S Department of Defense effort to create a portable programming language for data processing It was originally seen as a stopgap but the Defense Department promptly forced computer manufacturers to provide it resulting in its widespread adoption 11 It was standardized in 1968 and has been revised five times Expansions include support for structured and object oriented programming The current standard is ISO IEC 1989 2023 12 COBOL statements have prose syntax such as span class kr MOVE span span class w span span class nv x span span class w span span class kp TO span span class w span span class nv y span which was designed to be self documenting and highly readable However it is verbose and uses over 300 reserved words This contrasts with the succinct and mathematically inspired syntax of other languages in this case span class n y span span class w span span class o span span class w span span class n x span span class p span COBOL code is split into four divisions identification environment data and procedure containing a rigid hierarchy of sections paragraphs and sentences Lacking a large standard library the standard specifies 43 statements 87 functions and just one class Academic computer scientists were generally uninterested in business applications when COBOL was created and were not involved in its design it was effectively 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 13 COBOL has been criticized for its verbosity design process and poor support for structured programming These weaknesses result in monolithic programs that are hard to comprehend as a whole despite their local readability For years COBOL has been assumed as a programming language for business operations in mainframes 14 although in recent years many COBOL operations have been moved to cloud computing 15 Contents 1 History and specification 1 1 Background 1 2 COBOL 60 1 3 COBOL 61 to COBOL 65 1 4 COBOL 68 1 5 COBOL 74 1 6 COBOL 85 1 7 COBOL 2002 and object oriented COBOL 1 8 COBOL 2014 1 9 COBOL 2023 1 10 Legacy 2 Features 2 1 Syntax 2 1 1 Metalanguage 2 2 Code format 2 3 Identification division 2 3 1 Object oriented programming 2 4 Environment division 2 4 1 Files 2 5 Data division 2 5 1 Aggregated data 2 5 2 Other data levels 2 5 3 Data types 2 5 3 1 PICTURE clause 2 5 3 2 USAGE clause 2 5 4 Report writer 2 6 Procedure division 2 6 1 Procedures 2 6 2 Statements 2 6 2 1 Control flow 2 6 2 2 I O 2 6 2 3 Data manipulation 2 6 3 Scope termination 2 6 4 Self modifying code 2 7 Hello world 3 Reception 3 1 Lack of structure 3 2 Compatibility issues 3 3 Verbose syntax 3 4 Isolation from the computer science community 3 5 Concerns about the design process 3 6 Influences on other languages 4 See also 5 Notes 6 References 6 1 Citations 6 2 Sources 7 External linksHistory and specification editTimeline of COBOL language Year Informal name ANSI INCITS Standard ISO IEC Standard 1960 COBOL 60 1961 COBOL 61 1963 COBOL 61 Extended 1965 COBOL 65 1968 COBOL 68 X3 23 1968 1974 COBOL 74 X3 23 1974 1985 COBOL 85 X3 23 1985 1989 1985 2002 COBOL 2002 1989 2002 2014 COBOL 2014 1989 2014 2023 COBOL 2023 1989 2023 Background edit In the late 1950s computer users and manufacturers were becoming concerned about the rising cost of programming A 1959 survey had found that in any data processing installation the programming cost US 800 000 on average and that translating programs to run on new hardware would cost 600 000 At a time when new programming languages were proliferating the same survey suggested that if a common business oriented language were used conversion would be far cheaper and faster 16 On 8 April 1959 Mary K Hawes a computer scientist at Burroughs Corporation called a meeting of representatives from academia computer users and manufacturers at the University of Pennsylvania to organize a formal meeting on common business languages 17 Representatives included Grace Hopper inventor of the English like data processing language FLOW MATIC Jean Sammet and Saul Gorn 18 19 At the April meeting the group asked the Department of Defense DoD to sponsor an effort to create a common business language The delegation impressed Charles A Phillips director of the Data System Research Staff at the DoD 20 who thought that they thoroughly understood the DoD s problems The DoD operated 225 computers had 175 more on order and had spent over 200 million on implementing programs to run on them Portable programs would save time reduce costs and ease modernization 21 Charles Phillips agreed to sponsor the meeting and tasked the delegation with drafting the agenda 22 COBOL 60 edit On 28 and 29 May 1959 exactly one year after the Zurich ALGOL 58 meeting a meeting was held at the Pentagon to discuss the creation of a common programming language for business It was attended by 41 people and was chaired by Phillips 23 The Department of Defense was concerned about whether it could run the same data processing programs on different computers FORTRAN the only mainstream language at the time lacked the features needed to write such programs 24 Representatives enthusiastically described a language that could work in a wide variety of environments from banking and insurance to utilities and inventory control They agreed unanimously that more people should be able to program and that the new language should not be restricted by the limitations of contemporary technology A majority agreed that the language should make maximal use of English be capable of change be machine independent and be easy to use even at the expense of power 25 The meeting resulted in the creation of a steering committee and short intermediate and long range committees The short range committee was given to September three months to produce specifications for an interim language which would then be improved upon by the other committees 26 27 Their official mission however was to identify the strengths and weaknesses of existing programming languages and did not explicitly direct them to create a new language 24 The deadline was met with disbelief by the short range committee 28 One member Betty Holberton described the three month deadline as gross optimism and doubted that the language really would be a stopgap 29 The steering committee met on 4 June and agreed to name the entire activity as the Committee on Data Systems Languages or CODASYL and to form an executive committee 30 The short range committee members represented six computer manufacturers and three government agencies The computer manufacturers were Burroughs Corporation IBM Minneapolis Honeywell Honeywell Labs RCA Sperry Rand and Sylvania Electric Products The government agencies were the U S Air Force the Navy s David Taylor Model Basin and the National Bureau of Standards now the National Institute of Standards and Technology 31 The committee was chaired by Joseph Wegstein of the U S National Bureau of Standards Work began by investigating data description statements existing applications and user experiences 32 The committee mainly examined the FLOW MATIC AIMACO and COMTRAN programming languages 24 33 The FLOW MATIC language was particularly influential because it had been implemented and because AIMACO was a derivative of it with only minor changes 34 35 FLOW MATIC s inventor Grace Hopper also served as a technical adviser to the committee 28 FLOW MATIC s major contributions to COBOL were long variable names English words for commands and the separation of data descriptions and instructions 36 Hopper is sometimes called the mother of COBOL or the grandmother of COBOL 37 38 39 although Jean Sammet a lead designer of COBOL said Hopper was not the mother creator or developer of Cobol 40 1 IBM s COMTRAN language invented by Bob Bemer was regarded as a competitor to FLOW MATIC 41 42 by a short range committee made up of colleagues of Grace Hopper 43 Some of its features were not incorporated into COBOL so that it would not look like IBM had dominated the design process 26 and Jean Sammet said in 1981 that there had been a strong anti IBM bias from some committee members herself included 44 In one case after Roy Goldfinger author of the COMTRAN manual and intermediate range committee member attended a subcommittee meeting to support his language and encourage the use of algebraic expressions Grace Hopper sent a memo to the short range committee reiterating Sperry Rand s efforts to create a language based on English 45 In 1980 Grace Hopper commented that COBOL 60 is 95 FLOW MATIC and that COMTRAN had had an extremely small influence Furthermore she said that she would claim that work was influenced by both FLOW MATIC and COMTRAN only to keep other people happy so they wouldn t try to knock us out 46 Features from COMTRAN incorporated into COBOL included formulas 47 the PICTURE clause 48 an improved IF statement which obviated the need for GO TOs and a more robust file management system 41 The usefulness of the committee s work was subject of great debate While some members thought the language had too many compromises and was the result of design by committee others felt it was better than the three languages examined Some felt the language was too complex others too simple 49 Controversial features included those some considered useless or too advanced for data processing users Such features included Boolean expressions formulas and table subscripts indices 50 51 Another point of controversy was whether to make keywords context sensitive and the effect that would have on readability 50 Although context sensitive keywords were rejected the approach was later used in PL I and partially in COBOL from 2002 52 Little consideration was given to interactivity interaction with operating systems few existed at that time and functions thought of as purely mathematical and of no use in data processing 53 54 The specifications were presented to the executive committee on 4 September They fell short of expectations Joseph Wegstein noted that it contains rough spots and requires some additions and Bob Bemer later described them as a hodgepodge The subcommittee was given until December to improve it 28 At a mid September meeting the committee discussed the new language s name Suggestions included BUSY Business System INFOSYL Information System Language and COCOSYL Common Computer Systems Language 55 It is unclear who coined the name COBOL 56 57 although Bob Bemer later claimed it had been his suggestion 58 59 60 In October the intermediate range committee received copies of the FACT language specification created by Roy Nutt Its features impressed the committee so much that they passed a resolution to base COBOL on it 61 This was a blow to the short range committee who had made good progress on the specification Despite being technically superior FACT had not been created with portability in mind or through manufacturer and user consensus It also lacked a demonstrable implementation 28 allowing supporters of a FLOW MATIC based COBOL to overturn the resolution RCA representative Howard Bromberg also blocked FACT so that RCA s work on a COBOL implementation would not go to waste 62 It soon became apparent that the committee was too large for any further progress to be made quickly A frustrated Howard Bromberg bought a 15 tombstone with COBOL engraved on it and sent it to Charles Phillips to demonstrate his displeasure b 64 65 A sub committee was formed to analyze existing languages and was made up of six individuals 24 66 William Selden and Gertrude Tierney of IBM Howard Bromberg and Howard Discount of RCA Vernon Reeves and Jean E Sammet of Sylvania Electric Products The sub committee did most of the work creating the specification leaving the short range committee to review and modify their work before producing the finished specification 24 The specifications were approved by the executive committee on 8 January 1960 and sent to the government printing office which printed them as COBOL 60 The language s stated objectives were to allow efficient portable programs to be easily written to allow users to move to new systems with minimal effort and cost and to be suitable for inexperienced programmers 67 The CODASYL Executive Committee later created the COBOL Maintenance Committee to answer questions from users and vendors and to improve and expand the specifications 68 During 1960 the list of manufacturers planning to build COBOL compilers grew By September five more manufacturers had joined CODASYL Bendix Control Data Corporation General Electric GE National Cash Register and Philco and all represented manufacturers had announced COBOL compilers GE and IBM planned to integrate COBOL into their own languages GECOM and COMTRAN respectively In contrast International Computers and Tabulators planned to replace their language CODEL with COBOL 69 Meanwhile RCA and Sperry Rand worked on creating COBOL compilers The first COBOL program ran on 17 August on an RCA 501 70 On 6 and 7 December the same COBOL program albeit with minor changes ran on an RCA computer and a Remington Rand Univac computer demonstrating that compatibility could be achieved 71 The relative influences of which languages were used continues to this day in the recommended advisory printed in all COBOL reference manuals 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 No warranty expressed or implied is made by any contributor or by the CODASYL COBOL Committee as to the accuracy and functioning of the programming system and language Moreover no responsibility is assumed by any contributor or by the committee in connection therewith The authors and copyright holders of the copyrighted material used herein are as follows FLOW MATIC trademark of Unisys Corporation Programming for the UNIVAC R I and II Data Automation Systems copyrighted 1958 1959 by Unisys Corporation IBM Commercial Translator Form No F28 8013 copyrighted 1959 by IBM FACT DSI 27A5260 2760 copyrighted 1960 by Minneapolis Honeywell They have specifically authorized the use of this material in whole or in part in the COBOL specifications Such authorization extends to the reproduction and use of COBOL specifications in programming manuals or similar publications 72 COBOL 61 to COBOL 65 edit It is rather unlikely that Cobol will be around by the end of the decade Anonymous June 1960 73 Many logical flaws were found in COBOL 60 leading General Electric s Charles Katz to warn that it could not be interpreted unambiguously A reluctant short term committee performed a total cleanup and by March 1963 it was reported that COBOL s syntax was as definable as ALGOL s although semantic ambiguities remained 69 COBOL is a difficult language to write a compiler for due to the large syntax and many optional elements within syntactic constructs as well as to the need to generate efficient code for a language with many possible data representations implicit type conversions and necessary set ups for I O operations 74 Early COBOL compilers were primitive and slow A 1962 US Navy evaluation found compilation speeds of 3 11 statements per minute By mid 1964 they had increased to 11 1000 statements per minute It was observed that increasing memory would drastically increase speed and that compilation costs varied wildly costs per statement were between 0 23 and 18 91 75 In late 1962 IBM announced that COBOL would be their primary development language and that development of COMTRAN would cease 75 The COBOL specification was revised three times in the five years after its publication COBOL 60 was replaced in 1961 by COBOL 61 This was then replaced by the COBOL 61 Extended specifications in 1963 which introduced the sort and report writer facilities 76 The added facilities corrected flaws identified by Honeywell in late 1959 in a letter to the short range committee 70 COBOL Edition 1965 brought further clarifications to the specifications and introduced facilities for handling mass storage files and tables 77 COBOL 68 edit Efforts began to standardize COBOL to overcome incompatibilities between versions In late 1962 both ISO and the United States of America Standards Institute now ANSI formed groups to create standards ANSI produced USA Standard COBOL X3 23 in August 1968 which became the cornerstone for later versions 78 This version was known as American National Standard ANS COBOL and was adopted by ISO in 1972 79 COBOL 74 edit By 1970 COBOL had become the most widely used programming language in the world 80 Independently of the ANSI committee the CODASYL Programming Language Committee was working on improving the language They described new versions in 1968 1969 1970 and 1973 including changes such as new inter program communication debugging and file merging facilities as well as improved string handling and library inclusion features 81 Although CODASYL was independent of the ANSI committee the CODASYL Journal of Development was used by ANSI to identify features that were popular enough to warrant implementing 82 The Programming Language Committee also liaised with ECMA and the Japanese COBOL Standard committee 81 The Programming Language Committee was not well known however The vice president William Rinehuls complained that two thirds of the COBOL community did not know of the committee s existence It also lacked the funds to make public documents such as minutes of meetings and change proposals freely available 83 In 1974 ANSI published a revised version of ANS COBOL containing new features such as file organizations the DELETE statement 84 and the segmentation module 85 Deleted features included the NOTE statement the EXAMINE statement which was replaced by INSPECT and the implementer defined random access module which was superseded by the new sequential and relative I O modules These made up 44 changes which rendered existing statements incompatible with the new standard 86 The report writer was slated to be removed from COBOL but was reinstated before the standard was published 87 88 ISO later adopted the updated standard in 1978 79 COBOL 85 edit In June 1978 work began on revising COBOL 74 The proposed standard commonly called COBOL 80 differed significantly from the previous one causing concerns about incompatibility and conversion costs In January 1981 Joseph T Brophy Senior Vice president of Travelers Insurance threatened to sue the standard committee because it was not upwards compatible with COBOL 74 Mr Brophy described previous conversions of their 40 million line code base as non productive and a complete waste of our programmer resources 89 Later that year the Data Processing Management Association DPMA said it was strongly opposed to the new standard citing prohibitive conversion costs and enhancements that were forced on the user 90 91 During the first public review period the committee received 2 200 responses of which 1 700 were negative form letters 92 Other responses were detailed analyses of the effect COBOL 80 would have on their systems conversion costs were predicted to be at least 50 cents per line of code Fewer than a dozen of the responses were in favor of the proposed standard 93 ISO TC97 SC5 installed in 1979 the international COBOL Experts Group on initiative of Wim Ebbinkhuijsen The group consisted of COBOL experts from many countries including the United States Its goal was to achieve mutual understanding and respect between ANSI and the rest of the world with regard to the need of new COBOL features After three years ISO changed the status of the group to a formal Working Group WG 4 COBOL The group took primary ownership and development of the COBOL standard where ANSI made most of the proposals In 1983 the DPMA withdrew its opposition to the standard citing the responsiveness of the committee to public concerns In the same year a National Bureau of Standards study concluded that the proposed standard would present few problems 91 94 A year later DEC released a VAX VMS COBOL 80 and noted that conversion of COBOL 74 programs posed few problems The new EVALUATE statement and inline PERFORM were particularly well received and improved productivity thanks to simplified control flow and debugging 95 The second public review drew another 1 000 mainly negative responses while the last drew just 25 by which time many concerns had been addressed 91 In 1985 the ISO Working Group 4 accepted the then version of the ANSI proposed standard made several changes and set it as the new ISO standard COBOL 85 It was published in late 1985 Sixty features were changed or deprecated and 115 96 were added such as 97 98 Scope terminators END IF END PERFORM END READ etc Nested subprograms CONTINUE a no operation statement EVALUATE a switch statement INITIALIZE a statement that can set groups of data to their default values Inline PERFORM loop bodies previously loop bodies had to be specified in a separate procedure Reference modification which allows access to substrings I O status codes The new standard was adopted by all national standard bodies including ANSI 79 Two amendments followed in 1989 and 1993 The first amendment introduced intrinsic functions and the other provided corrections 79 COBOL 2002 and object oriented COBOL edit In 1997 Gartner Group estimated that there were a total of 200 billion lines of COBOL in existence which ran 80 of all business programs c 99 In the early 1990s work began on adding object orientation in the next full revision of COBOL Object oriented features were taken from C and Smalltalk 2 3 The initial estimate was to have this revision completed by 1997 and an ISO Committee Draft CD was available by 1997 Some vendors including Micro Focus Fujitsu and IBM introduced object oriented syntax based on drafts of the full revision The final approved ISO standard was approved and published in late 2002 100 Fujitsu GTSoftware 101 Micro Focus introduced object oriented COBOL compilers targeting the NET Framework There were many other new features many of which had been in the CODASYL COBOL Journal of Development since 1978 and had missed the opportunity to be included in COBOL 85 102 These other features included 103 104 Free form code User defined functions Recursion Locale based processing Support for extended character sets such as Unicode Floating point and binary data types until then binary items were truncated based on their declaration s base 10 specification Portable arithmetic results Bit and Boolean data types Pointers and syntax for getting and freeing storage The SCREEN SECTION for text based user interfaces The VALIDATE facility Improved interoperability with other programming languages and framework environments such as NET and Java Three corrigenda were published for the standard two in 2006 and one in 2009 105 COBOL 2014 edit Between 2003 and 2009 three technical reports were produced describing object finalization XML processing and collection classes for COBOL 105 COBOL 2002 suffered from poor support no compilers completely supported the standard Micro Focus found that it was due to a lack of user demand for the new features and due to the abolition of the NIST test suite which had been used to test compiler conformance The standardization process was also found to be slow and under resourced 106 COBOL 2014 includes the following changes 107 Portable arithmetic results have been replaced by IEEE 754 data types Major features have been made optional such as the VALIDATE facility the report writer and the screen handling facility Method overloading Dynamic capacity tables a feature dropped from the draft of COBOL 2002 108 COBOL 2023 edit The COBOL 2023 standard added a few new features Asynchronous messaging syntax using the SEND and RECEIVE statements 109 A transaction processing facility with a href Commit data management html title Commit data management COMMIT a and a href Rollback data management html title Rollback data management ROLLBACK a 109 a href XOR html class mw redirect title XOR XOR a logical operator 109 The CONTINUE statement can be extended as to pause the program for a specified duration 110 A DELETE FILE statement 110 LINE SEQUENTIAL file organization 111 Defined infinite looping with PERFORM UNTIL EXIT 110 SUBSTITUTE intrinsic function allowing for substring substitution of different length 110 CONVERT function for base conversion 110 Boolean shifting operators 112 There is as yet no known complete implementation of this standard citation needed Legacy edit COBOL programs are used globally in governments and businesses and are running on diverse operating systems such as z OS z VSE VME Unix NonStop OS OpenVMS and Windows In 1997 the Gartner Group reported that 80 of the world s business ran on COBOL with over 200 billion lines of code c and 5 billion lines more being written annually 113 Near the end of the 20th century the year 2000 problem Y2K was the focus of significant COBOL programming effort sometimes by the same programmers who had designed the systems decades before 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 114 Some studies attribute as much as 24 of Y2K software repair costs to Cobol 115 After the clean up effort put into these programs for Y2K a 2003 survey found that many remained in use 116 The authors said that the survey data suggest a gradual decline in the importance of COBOL in application development over the following 10 years unless integration with other languages and technologies can be adopted 117 In 2006 and 2012 Computerworld surveys of 352 readers found that over 60 of organizations used COBOL more than C and Visual Basic NET and that for half of those COBOL was used for the majority of their internal software 9 118 36 of managers said they planned to migrate from COBOL and 25 said that they would do so if not for the expense of rewriting legacy code Alternatively some businesses have migrated their COBOL programs from mainframes to cheaper faster hardware 9 Testimony before the House of Representatives in 2016 indicated that COBOL is still in use by many federal agencies 119 Reuters reported in 2017 that 43 of banking systems still used COBOL with over 220 billion lines of COBOL code in use 120 By 2019 the number of COBOL programmers was shrinking fast due to retirements leading to an impending skills gap in business and government organizations which still use mainframe systems for high volume transaction processing Efforts to rewrite systems in newer languages have proven expensive and problematic as has the outsourcing of code maintenance thus proposals to train more people in COBOL are advocated 121 During the COVID 19 pandemic and the ensuing surge of unemployment several US states reported a shortage of skilled COBOL programmers to support the legacy systems used for unemployment benefit management Many of these systems had been in the process of conversion to more modern programming languages prior to the pandemic but the process was put on hold 122 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 123 Features editSyntax edit COBOL has an English like syntax which is used to describe nearly everything in a program For example a condition can be expressed as span class nv x span span class w span span class kp IS span span class w span span class ow GREATER span span class w span span class ow THAN span span class w span span class nv y span or more concisely as span class nv x span span class w span span class ow GREATER span span class w span span class nv y span or span class nv x span span class w span span class o gt span span class w span span class nv y span More complex conditions can be abbreviated by removing repeated conditions and variables For example span class nv a span span class w span span class o gt span span class w span span class nv b span span class w span span class ow AND span span class w span span class nv a span span class w span span class o gt span span class w span span class nv c span span class w span span class ow OR span span class w span span class nv a span span class w span span class o span span class w span span class nv d span can be shortened to span class nv a span span class w span span class o gt span span class w span span class nv b span span class w span span class ow AND span span class w span span class nv c span span class w span span class ow OR span span class o span span class w span span class nv d span To support this syntax COBOL has over 300 keywords 124 d Some of the keywords are simple alternative or pluralized spellings of the same word which provides for more grammatically appropriate statements and clauses e g the IN and OF keywords can be used interchangeably as can TIME and TIMES and VALUE and VALUES Each COBOL program is made up of four basic lexical items words literals picture character strings see PICTURE clause and separators Words include reserved words and user defined identifiers They are up to 31 characters long and may include letters digits hyphens and underscores Literals include numerals e g 12 and strings e g Hello 126 Separators include the space character and commas and semi colons followed by a space 127 A COBOL program is split into four divisions the identification division the environment division the data division and the procedure division The identification division specifies the name and type of the source element and is where classes and interfaces are specified The environment division specifies any program features that depend on the system running it such as files and character sets The data division is used to declare variables and parameters The procedure division contains the program s statements Each division is sub divided into sections which are made up of paragraphs Metalanguage edit COBOL s syntax is usually described with a unique metalanguage using braces brackets bars and underlining The metalanguage was developed for the original COBOL specifications Although Backus Naur form did exist at the time the committee had not heard of it 128 Elements of COBOL s metalanguage Element Appearance Function All capitals EXAMPLE Reserved word Underlining EXAMPLE The reserved word is compulsory Braces Only one option may be selected Brackets Zero or one options may be selected Ellipsis The preceding element may be repeated Bars One or more options may be selected Any option may only be selected once Zero or more options may be selected Any option may only be selected once As an example consider the following description of an ADD statement ADD identifier 1 literal 1 TO identifier 2 ROUNDED ON SIZE ERROR imperative statement 1 NOT ON SIZE ERROR imperative statement 2 END ADD displaystyle begin array l underline text ADD begin Bmatrix text identifier 1 text literal 1 end Bmatrix dots underline text TO left text identifier 2 left underline text ROUNDED right right dots 1em quad left left begin array l text ON underline text SIZE underline text ERROR text imperative statement 1 underline text NOT text ON underline text SIZE underline text ERROR text imperative statement 2 end array right right 1em quad left underline text END ADD right end array nbsp This description permits the following variants ADD 1 TO x ADD 1 a b TO x ROUNDED y z ROUNDED ADD a b TO c ON SIZE ERROR DISPLAY Error END ADD ADD a TO b NOT SIZE ERROR DISPLAY No error ON SIZE ERROR DISPLAY Error Code format edit nbsp COBOL program deck of punched cards from the 1970s The height of COBOL s popularity coincided with the era of keypunch machines and punched cards The program itself was written onto punched cards then read in and compiled and the data fed into the program was sometimes on cards as well 129 COBOL can be written in two formats fixed the default or free In fixed format code must be aligned to fit in certain areas a hold over from using punched cards Until COBOL 2002 these were Name Column s Usage Sequence number area 1 6 Originally used for card line numbers facilitating mechanical punched card sorting to assure intended program code sequence after manual editing handling this area is ignored by the compiler Indicator area 7 The following characters are allowed here Comment line Comment line that will be printed on a new page of a source listing Continuation line where words or literals from the previous line are continued D Line enabled in debugging mode which is otherwise ignored Area A 8 11 This contains DIVISION SECTION and procedure headers 01 and 77 level numbers and file report descriptors Area B 12 72 Any other code not allowed in Area A Program name area 73 Historically up to column 80 for punched cards it is used to identify the program or sequence the card belongs to In COBOL 2002 Areas A and B were merged to form the program text area which now ends at an implementor defined column 130 COBOL 2002 also introduced free format code Free format code can be placed in any column of the file as in newer programming languages Comments are specified using gt which can be placed anywhere and can also be used in fixed format source code Continuation lines are not present and the gt gt PAGE directive replaces the indicator 130 Identification division edit The identification division identifies the following code entity and contains the definition of a class or interface Object oriented programming edit Classes and interfaces have been in COBOL since 2002 Classes have factory objects containing class methods and variables and instance objects containing instance methods and variables 131 Inheritance and interfaces provide polymorphism Support for generic programming is provided through parameterized classes which can be instantiated to use any class or interface Objects are stored as references which may be restricted to a certain type There are two ways of calling a method the INVOKE statement which acts similarly to CALL or through inline method invocation which is analogous to using functions 132 gt These are equivalent INVOKE my class foo RETURNING var MOVE my class foo TO var gt Inline method invocation COBOL does not provide a way to hide methods Class data can be hidden however by declaring it without a PROPERTY clause which leaves external code no way to access it 133 Method overloading was added in COBOL 2014 134 Environment division edit The environment division contains the configuration section and the input output section The configuration section is used to specify variable features such as currency signs locales and character sets The input output section contains file related information Files edit COBOL supports three file formats or organizations sequential indexed and relative In sequential files records are contiguous and must be traversed sequentially similarly to a linked list Indexed files have one or more indexes which allow records to be randomly accessed and which can be sorted on them Each record must have a unique key but other alternate record keys need not be unique Implementations of indexed files vary between vendors although common implementations such as C ISAM and VSAM are based on IBM s ISAM other implementations are Record Management Services on OpenVMS and Enscribe on HPE NonStop Tandem Relative files like indexed files have a unique record key but they do not have alternate keys A relative record s key is its ordinal position for example the 10th record has a key of 10 This means that creating a record with a key of 5 may require the creation of empty preceding records Relative files also allow for both sequential and random access 135 A common non standard extension is the line sequential organization used to process text files Records in a file are terminated by a newline and may be of varying length 136 Data division edit The data division is split into six sections which declare different items the file section for file records the working storage section for static variables the local storage section for automatic variables the linkage section for parameters and the return value the report section and the screen section for text based user interfaces Aggregated data edit Data items in COBOL are declared hierarchically through the use of level numbers which indicate if a data item is part of another An item with a higher level number is subordinate to an item with a lower one Top level data items with a level number of 1 are called records Items that have subordinate aggregate data are called group items those that do not are called elementary items Level numbers used to describe standard data items are between 1 and 49 137 138 01 some record gt Aggregate group record item 05 num PIC 9 10 gt Elementary item 05 the date gt Aggregate sub group record item 10 the year PIC 9 4 gt Elementary item 10 the month PIC 99 gt Elementary item 10 the day PIC 99 gt Elementary item In the above example elementary item num and group item the date are subordinate to the record some record while elementary items the year the month and the day are part of the group item the date Subordinate items can be disambiguated with the IN or OF keyword For example consider the example code above along with the following example 01 sale date 05 the year PIC 9 4 05 the month PIC 99 05 the day PIC 99 The names the year the month and the day are ambiguous by themselves since more than one data item is defined with those names To specify a particular data item for instance one of the items contained within the sale date group the programmer would use the year IN sale date or the equivalent the year OF sale date This syntax is similar to the dot notation supported by most contemporary languages Other data levels edit A level number of 66 is used to declare a re grouping of previously defined items irrespective of how those items are structured This data level also referred to by the associated RENAMES clause is rarely used 139 and circa 1988 was usually found in old programs Its ability to ignore the hierarchical and logical structure data meant its use was not recommended and many installations forbade its use 140 01 customer record 05 cust key PIC X 10 05 cust name 10 cust first name PIC X 30 10 cust last name PIC X 30 05 cust dob PIC 9 8 05 cust balance PIC 9 7 V99 66 cust personal details RENAMES cust name THRU cust dob 66 cust all details RENAMES cust name THRU cust balance A 77 level number indicates the item is stand alone and in such situations is equivalent to the level number 01 For example the following code declares two 77 level data items property name and sales region which are non group data items that are independent of not subordinate to any other data items 77 property name PIC X 80 77 sales region PIC 9 5 An 88 level number declares a condition name a so called 88 level which is true when its parent data item contains one of the values specified in its VALUE clause 141 For example the following code defines two 88 level condition name items that are true or false depending on the current character data value of the wage type data item When the data item contains a value of H the condition name wage is hourly is true whereas when it contains a value of S or Y the condition name wage is yearly is true If the data item contains some other value both of the condition names are false 01 wage type PIC X 88 wage is hourly VALUE H 88 wage is yearly VALUE S Y Data types edit Standard COBOL provides the following data types 142 Data type Sample declaration Notes Alphabetic span class kt PIC A 30 span May contain only letters or spaces Alphanumeric span class kt PIC X 30 span May contain any characters Boolean span class kt PIC 1 span span class w span span class kp USAGE span span class w span span class err BIT span Data stored in the form of 0s and 1s as a binary number Index span class kp USAGE span span class w span span class kp INDEX span Used to reference table elements National span class kt PIC N 30 span Similar to alphanumeric but using an extended character set e g UTF 8 Numeric span class kt PIC 9 5 V9 2 span Contains exactly 7 digits 7 5 2 V locates the implicit decimal in a fixed point number Object span class kp USAGE span span class w span span class err OBJECT span span class w span span class kp REFERENCE span May reference either an object or NULL Pointer span class kp USAGE span span class w span span class kp POINTER span Type safety is variable in COBOL Numeric data is converted between different representations and sizes silently and alphanumeric data can be placed in any data item that can be stored as a string including numeric and group data 143 In contrast object references and pointers may only be assigned from items of the same type and their values may be restricted to a certain type 144 PICTURE clause edit A PICTURE or PIC clause is a string of characters each of which represents a portion of the data item and what it may contain Some picture characters specify the type of the item and how many characters or digits it occupies in memory For example a 9 indicates a decimal digit and an S indicates that the item is signed Other picture characters called insertion and editing characters specify how an item should be formatted For example a series of characters define character positions as well as how a leading sign character is to be positioned within the final character data the rightmost non numeric character will contain the item s sign while other character positions corresponding to a to the left of this position will contain a space Repeated characters can be specified more concisely by specifying a number in parentheses after a picture character for example 9 7 is equivalent to 9999999 Picture specifications containing only digit 9 and sign S characters define purely numeric data items while picture specifications containing alphabetic A or alphanumeric X characters define alphanumeric data items The presence of other formatting characters define edited numeric or edited alphanumeric data items 145 Examples PICTURE clause Value in Value out span class kt PIC 9 5 span 100 00100 Hello Hello this is legal but results in undefined behavior 143 span class kt PIC span 10 10 note leading spaces span class kt PIC 99 99 9 4 span 30042003 30 04 2003 span class kt PIC 4 9 99 span 100 50 100 50 0 0 00 span class kt PIC X 3 BX 3 BX 3 span ABCDEFGHI ABC DEF GHI USAGE clause edit This section is missing information about COMPUTATIONAL 5 Please expand the section to include this information Further details may exist on the talk page April 2021 The USAGE clause declares the format in which data is stored Depending on the data type it can either complement or be used instead of a PICTURE clause While it can be used to declare pointers and object references it is mostly geared towards specifying numeric types These numeric formats are 146 Binary where a minimum size is either specified by the PICTURE clause or by a USAGE clause such as BINARY LONG span class kp USAGE span span class w span span class kt COMPUTATIONAL span where data may be stored in whatever format the implementation provides often equivalent to span class kp USAGE span span class w span span class kt BINARY span span class kp USAGE span span class w span span class kr DISPLAY span the default format where data is stored as a string Floating point in either an implementation dependent format or according to IEEE 754 span class kp USAGE span span class w span span class kp NATIONAL span where data is stored as a string using an extended character set span class kp USAGE span span class w span span class kp PACKED DECIMAL span where data is stored in the smallest possible decimal format typically packed binary coded decimal Report writer edit The report writer is a declarative facility for creating reports The programmer need only specify the report layout and the data required to produce it freeing them from having to write code to handle things like page breaks data formatting and headings and footings 147 Reports are associated with report files which are files which may only be written to through report writer statements FD report out REPORT sales report Each report is defined in the report section of the data division A report is split into report groups which define the report s headings footings and details Reports work around hierarchical control breaks Control breaks occur when a key variable changes it value for example when creating a report detailing customers orders a control break could occur when the program reaches a different customer s orders Here is an example report description for a report which gives a salesperson s sales and which warns of any invalid records RD sales report PAGE LIMITS 60 LINES FIRST DETAIL 3 CONTROLS seller name 01 TYPE PAGE HEADING 03 COL 1 VALUE Sales Report 03 COL 74 VALUE Page 03 COL 79 PIC Z9 SOURCE PAGE COUNTER 01 sales on day TYPE DETAIL LINE 1 03 COL 3 VALUE Sales on 03 COL 12 PIC 99 99 9999 SOURCE sales date 03 COL 21 VALUE were 03 COL 26 PIC 9 99 SOURCE sales amount 01 invalid sales TYPE DETAIL LINE 1 03 COL 3 VALUE INVALID RECORD 03 COL 19 PIC X 34 SOURCE sales record 01 TYPE CONTROL HEADING seller name LINE 2 03 COL 1 VALUE Seller 03 COL 9 PIC X 30 SOURCE seller name The above report description describes the following layout Sales Report Page 1 Seller Howard Bromberg Sales on 10 12 2008 were 1000 00 Sales on 12 12 2008 were 0 00 Sales on 13 12 2008 were 31 47 INVALID RECORD Howard Bromberg XXXXYY Seller Howard Discount Sales Report Page 12 Sales on 08 05 2014 were 543 98 INVALID RECORD William Selden 12O52014FOOFOO Sales on 30 05 2014 were 0 00 Four statements control the report writer INITIATE which prepares the report writer for printing GENERATE which prints a report group SUPPRESS which suppresses the printing of a report group and TERMINATE which terminates report processing For the above sales report example the procedure division might look like this OPEN INPUT sales OUTPUT report out INITIATE sales report PERFORM UNTIL 1 lt gt 1 READ sales AT END EXIT PERFORM END READ VALIDATE sales record IF valid record GENERATE sales on day ELSE GENERATE invalid sales END IF END PERFORM TERMINATE sales report CLOSE sales report out Use of the Report Writer facility tends to vary considerably some organizations use it extensively and some not at all 148 In addition implementations of Report Writer ranged in quality with those at the lower end sometimes using excessive amounts of memory at runtime 148 Procedure division edit Procedures edit The sections and paragraphs in the procedure division collectively called procedures can be used as labels and as simple subroutines Unlike in other divisions paragraphs do not need to be in sections 149 Execution goes down through the procedures of a program until it is terminated 150 To use procedures as subroutines the PERFORM verb is used A PERFORM statement somewhat resembles a procedure call in a newer languages in the sense that execution returns to the code following the PERFORM statement at the end of the called code however it does not provide a mechanism for parameter passing or for returning a result value If a subroutine is invoked using a simple statement like span class kr PERFORM span span class w span span class nv subroutine span then control returns at the end of the called procedure However PERFORM is unusual in that it may be used to call a range spanning a sequence of several adjacent procedures This is done with the span class kr PERFORM span span class w span span class nv sub 1 span span class w span span class kp THRU span span class w span span class nv sub n span construct PROCEDURE so and so PERFORM ALPHA PERFORM ALPHA THRU GAMMA STOP RUN ALPHA DISPLAY A BETA DISPLAY B GAMMA DISPLAY C The output of this program will be A A B C PERFORM also differs from conventional procedure calls in that there is at least traditionally no notion of a call stack As a consequence nested invocations are possible a sequence of code being PERFORM ed may execute a PERFORM statement itself but require extra care if parts of the same code are executed by both invocations The problem arises when the code in the inner invocation reaches the exit point of the outer invocation More formally if control passes through the exit point of a PERFORM invocation that was called earlier but has not yet completed the COBOL 2002 standard stipulates that the behavior is undefined The reason is that COBOL rather than a return address operates with what may be called a continuation address When control flow reaches the end of any procedure the continuation address is looked up and control is transferred to that address Before the program runs the continuation address for every procedure is initialized to the start address of the procedure that comes next in the program text so that if no PERFORM statements happen control flows from top to bottom through the program But when a PERFORM statement executes it modifies the continuation address of the called procedure or the last procedure of the called range if PERFORM THRU was used so that control will return to the call site at the end The original value is saved and is restored afterwards but there is only one storage position If two nested invocations operate on overlapping code they may interfere which each other s management of the continuation address in several ways 151 152 The following example taken from Veerman amp Verhoeven 2006 illustrates the problem LABEL1 DISPLAY 1 PERFORM LABEL2 THRU LABEL3 STOP RUN LABEL2 DISPLAY 2 PERFORM LABEL3 THRU LABEL4 LABEL3 DISPLAY 3 LABEL4 DISPLAY 4 One might expect that the output of this program would be 1 2 3 4 3 After displaying 2 the second PERFORM causes 3 and 4 to be displayed and then the first invocation continues on with 3 In traditional COBOL implementations this is not the case Rather the first PERFORM statement sets the continuation address at the end of LABEL3 so that it will jump back to the call site inside LABEL1 The second PERFORM statement sets the return at the end of LABEL4 but does not modify the continuation address of LABEL3 expecting it to be the default continuation Thus when the inner invocation arrives at the end of LABEL3 it jumps back to the outer PERFORM statement and the program stops having printed just 1 2 3 On the other hand in some COBOL implementations like the open source TinyCOBOL compiler the two PERFORM statements do not interfere with each other and the output is indeed 1 2 3 4 3 Therefore the behavior in such cases is not only perhaps surprising it is also not portable 152 A special consequence of this limitation is that PERFORM cannot be used to write recursive code Another simple example to illustrate this slightly simplified from Veerman amp Verhoeven 2006 MOVE 1 TO A PERFORM LABEL STOP RUN LABEL DISPLAY A IF A lt 3 ADD 1 TO A PERFORM LABEL END IF DISPLAY END One might expect that the output is 1 2 3 END END END and in fact that is what some COBOL compilers will produce But other compilers like IBM COBOL will produce code that prints 1 2 3 END END END END and so on printing END over and over in an endless loop Since there is limited space to store backup continuation addresses the backups get overwritten in the course of recursive invocations and all that can be restored is the jump back to DISPLAY END 152 Statements edit COBOL 2014 has 47 statements also called verbs 153 which can be grouped into the following broad categories control flow I O data manipulation and the report writer The report writer statements are covered in the report writer section Control flow edit COBOL s conditional statements are IF and EVALUATE EVALUATE is a switch like statement with the added capability of evaluating multiple values and conditions This can be used to implement decision tables For example the following might be used to control a CNC lathe EVALUATE TRUE ALSO desired speed ALSO current speed WHEN lid closed ALSO min speed THRU max speed ALSO LESS THAN desired speed PERFORM speed up machine WHEN lid closed ALSO min speed THRU max speed ALSO GREATER THAN desired speed PERFORM slow down machine WHEN lid open ALSO ANY ALSO NOT ZERO PERFORM emergency stop WHEN OTHER CONTINUE END EVALUATE The PERFORM statement is used to define loops which are executed until a condition is true not while true which is more common in other languages It is also used to call procedures or ranges of procedures see the procedures section for more details CALL and INVOKE call subprograms and methods respectively The name of the subprogram method is contained in a string which may be a literal or a data item 154 Parameters can be passed by reference by content where a copy is passed by reference or by value but only if a prototype is available 155 CANCEL unloads subprograms from memory GO TO causes the program to jump to a specified procedure The GOBACK statement is a return statement and the STOP statement stops the program The EXIT statement has six different formats it can be used as a return statement a break statement a continue statement an end marker or to leave a procedure 156 Exceptions are raised by a RAISE statement and caught with a handler or declarative defined in the DECLARATIVES portion of the procedure division Declaratives are sections beginning with a USE statement which specify the errors to handle Exceptions can be names or objects RESUME is used in a declarative to jump to the statement after the one that raised the exception or to a procedure outside the DECLARATIVES Unlike other languages uncaught exceptions may not terminate the program and the program can proceed unaffected I O edit File I O is handled by the self describing OPEN CLOSE READ and WRITE statements along with a further three REWRITE which updates a record START which selects subsequent records to access by finding a record with a certain key and UNLOCK which releases a lock on the last record accessed User interaction is done using ACCEPT and DISPLAY Data manipulation edit The following verbs manipulate data INITIALIZE which sets data items to their default values MOVE which assigns values to data items MOVE CORRESPONDING assigns corresponding like named fields SET which has 15 formats it can modify indices assign object references and alter table capacities among other functions 157 ADD SUBTRACT MULTIPLY DIVIDE and COMPUTE which handle arithmetic with COMPUTE assigning the result of a formula to a variable ALLOCATE and FREE which handle dynamic memory VALIDATE which validates and distributes data as specified in an item s description in the data division STRING and UNSTRING which concatenate and split strings respectively INSPECT which tallies or replaces instances of specified substrings within a string SEARCH which searches a table for the first entry satisfying a condition Files and tables are sorted using SORT and the MERGE verb merges and sorts files The RELEASE verb provides records to sort and RETURN retrieves sorted records in order Scope termination edit Some statements such as IF and READ may themselves contain statements Such statements may be terminated in two ways by a period implicit termination which terminates all unterminated statements contained or by a scope terminator which terminates the nearest matching open statement gt Terminator period implicit termination IF invalid record IF no more records NEXT SENTENCE ELSE READ record file AT END SET no more records TO TRUE gt Scope terminators explicit termination IF invalid record IF no more records CONTINUE ELSE READ record file AT END SET no more records TO TRUE END READ END IF END IF Nested statements terminated with a period are a common source of bugs 158 159 For example examine the following code IF x DISPLAY y DISPLAY z Here the intent is to display y and z if condition x is true However z will be displayed whatever the value of x because the IF statement is terminated by an erroneous period after span class kr DISPLAY span span class w span span class nv y span Another bug is a result of the dangling else problem when two IF statements can associate with an ELSE IF x IF y DISPLAY a ELSE DISPLAY b In the above fragment the ELSE associates with the span class kr IF span span class w span span class nv y span statement instead of the span class kr IF span span class w span span class nv x span statement causing a bug Prior to the introduction of explicit scope terminators preventing it would require span class kr ELSE span span class w span span class kp NEXT span span class w span span class kp SENTENCE span to be placed after the inner IF 159 Self modifying code edit The original 1959 COBOL specification supported the infamous span class kp ALTER span span class w span span class nv X span span class w span span class kp TO span span class w span span class kp PROCEED span span class w span span class kp TO span span class w span span class nv Y span statement for which many compilers generated self modifying code X and Y are procedure labels and the single span class kr GO span span class w span span class kp TO span statement in procedure X executed after such an ALTER statement means span class kr GO span span class w span span class kp TO span span class w span span class nv Y span instead Many compilers still support it 160 but it was deemed obsolete in the COBOL 1985 standard and deleted in 2002 161 The ALTER statement was poorly regarded because it undermined locality of context and made a program s overall logic difficult to comprehend 162 As textbook author Daniel D McCracken wrote in 1976 when someone who has never seen the program before must become familiar with it as quickly as possible sometimes under critical time pressure because the program has failed the sight of a GO TO statement in a paragraph by itself signaling as it does the existence of an unknown number of ALTER statements at unknown locations throughout the program strikes fear in the heart of the bravest programmer 162 Hello world edit A Hello World program in COBOL IDENTIFICATION DIVISION PROGRAM ID hello world PROCEDURE DIVISION DISPLAY Hello world When the now famous Hello World program example in The C Programming Language was first published in 1978 a similar mainframe COBOL program sample would have been submitted through JCL very likely using a punch card reader and 80 column punch cards The listing below with an empty DATA DIVISION was tested using Linux and the System 370 Hercules emulator running MVS 3 8J The JCL written in July 2015 is derived from the Hercules tutorials and samples hosted by Jay Moseley 163 In keeping with COBOL programming of that era HELLO WORLD is displayed in all capital letters COBUCLG JOB 001 COBOL BASE TEST 00010000 CLASS A MSGCLASS A MSGLEVEL 1 1 00020000 BASETEST EXEC COBUCLG 00030000 COB SYSIN DD 00040000 00000 VALIDATION OF BASE COBOL INSTALL 00050000 01000 IDENTIFICATION DIVISION 00060000 01100 PROGRAM ID HELLO 00070000 02000 ENVIRONMENT DIVISION 00080000 02100 CONFIGURATION SECTION 00090000 02110 SOURCE COMPUTER GNULINUX 00100000 02120 OBJECT COMPUTER HERCULES 00110000 02200 SPECIAL NAMES 00120000 02210 CONSOLE IS CONSL 00130000 03000 DATA DIVISION 00140000 04000 PROCEDURE DIVISION 00150000 04100 00 MAIN 00160000 04110 DISPLAY HELLO WORLD UPON CONSL 00170000 04900 STOP RUN 00180000 LKED SYSLIB DD DSNAME SYS1 COBLIB DISP SHR 00190000 DD DSNAME SYS1 LINKLIB DISP SHR 00200000 GO SYSPRINT DD SYSOUT A 00210000 00220000 After submitting the JCL the MVS console displayed 19 52 48 JOB 3 HASP100 COBUCLG ON READER1 COBOL BASE TEST 19 52 48 JOB 3 IEF677I WARNING MESSAGE S FOR JOB COBUCLG ISSUED 19 52 48 JOB 3 HASP373 COBUCLG STARTED INIT 1 CLASS A SYS BSP1 19 52 48 JOB 3 IEC130I SYSPUNCH DD STATEMENT MISSING 19 52 48 JOB 3 IEC130I SYSLIB DD STATEMENT MISSING 19 52 48 JOB 3 IEC130I SYSPUNCH DD STATEMENT MISSING 19 52 48 JOB 3 IEFACTRT Stepname Procstep Program Retcode 19 52 48 JOB 3 COBUCLG BASETEST COB IKFCBL00 RC 0000 19 52 48 JOB 3 COBUCLG BASETEST LKED IEWL RC 0000 19 52 48 JOB 3 HELLO WORLD 19 52 48 JOB 3 COBUCLG BASETEST GO PGM DD RC 0000 19 52 48 JOB 3 HASP395 COBUCLG ENDED Line 10 of the console listing above is highlighted for effect the highlighting is not part of the actual console output The associated compiler listing generated over four pages of technical detail and job run information for the single line of output from the 14 lines of COBOL Reception editLack of structure edit In the 1970s adoption of the structured programming paradigm was becoming increasingly widespread Edsger Dijkstra a preeminent computer scientist wrote a letter to the editor of Communications of the ACM published in 1975 entitled How do we tell truths that might hurt in which he was critical of COBOL and several other contemporary languages remarking that the use of COBOL cripples the mind 164 In a published dissent to Dijkstra s remarks the computer scientist Howard E Tompkins claimed that unstructured COBOL tended to be written by programmers that have never had the benefit of structured COBOL taught well arguing that the issue was primarily one of training 165 One cause of spaghetti code was the GO TO statement Attempts to remove GO TOs from COBOL code however resulted in convoluted programs and reduced code quality 166 GO TOs were largely replaced by the PERFORM statement and procedures which promoted modular programming 166 and gave easy access to powerful looping facilities However PERFORM could be used only with procedures so loop bodies were not located where they were used making programs harder to understand 167 COBOL programs were infamous for being monolithic and lacking modularization 168 COBOL code could be modularized only through procedures which were found to be inadequate for large systems It was impossible to restrict access to data meaning a procedure could access and modify any data item Furthermore there was no way to pass parameters to a procedure an omission Jean Sammet regarded as the committee s biggest mistake 169 Another complication stemmed from the ability to PERFORM THRU a specified sequence of procedures This meant that control could jump to and return from any procedure creating convoluted control flow and permitting a programmer to break the single entry single exit rule 170 This situation improved as COBOL adopted more features COBOL 74 added subprograms giving programmers the ability to control the data each part of the program could access COBOL 85 then added nested subprograms allowing programmers to hide subprograms 171 Further control over data and code came in 2002 when object oriented programming user defined functions and user defined data types were included Nevertheless much important legacy COBOL software uses unstructured code which has become practically unmaintainable It can be too risky and costly to modify even a simple section of code since it may be used from unknown places in unknown ways 172 Compatibility issues edit COBOL was intended to be a highly portable common language However by 2001 around 300 dialects had been created 173 One source of dialects was the standard itself the 1974 standard was composed of one mandatory nucleus and eleven functional modules each containing two or three levels of support This permitted 104 976 possible variants 174 COBOL 85 was not fully compatible with earlier versions and its development was controversial Joseph T Brophy the CIO of Travelers Insurance spearheaded an effort to inform COBOL users of the heavy reprogramming costs of implementing the new standard 175 As a result the ANSI COBOL Committee received more than 2 200 letters from the public mostly negative requiring the committee to make changes On the other hand conversion to COBOL 85 was thought to increase productivity in future years thus justifying the conversion costs 176 Verbose syntax edit COBOL koh bol n A weak verbose and flabby language used by code grinders to do boring mindless things on dinosaur mainframes Its very name is seldom uttered without ritual expressions of disgust or horror The Jargon File 4 4 8 177 COBOL syntax has often been criticized for its verbosity Proponents say that this was intended to make the code self documenting easing program maintenance 178 COBOL was also intended to be easy for programmers to learn and use 179 while still being readable to non technical staff such as managers 180 181 182 183 The desire for readability led to the use of English like syntax and structural elements such as nouns verbs clauses sentences sections and divisions Yet by 1984 maintainers of COBOL programs were struggling to deal with incomprehensible code 182 and the main changes in COBOL 85 were there to help ease maintenance 92 Jean Sammet a short range committee member noted that little attempt was made to cater to the professional programmer in fact people whose main interest is programming tend to be very unhappy with COBOL which she attributed to COBOL s verbose syntax 184 Isolation from the computer science community edit The COBOL community has always been isolated from the computer science community No academic computer scientists participated in the design of COBOL all of those on the committee came from commerce or government Computer scientists at the time were more interested in fields like numerical analysis physics and system programming than the commercial file processing problems which COBOL development tackled 185 Jean Sammet attributed COBOL s unpopularity to an initial snob reaction due to its inelegance the lack of influential computer scientists participating in the design process and a disdain for business data processing 186 The COBOL specification used a unique notation or metalanguage to define its syntax rather than the new Backus Naur form which the committee did not know of This resulted in severe criticism 187 188 69 The academic world tends to regard COBOL as verbose clumsy and inelegant and tries to ignore it although there are probably more COBOL programs and programmers in the world than there are for FORTRAN ALGOL and PL I combined For the most part only schools with an immediate vocational objective provide instruction in COBOL Richard Conway and David Gries 1973 189 Later COBOL suffered from a shortage of material covering it it took until 1963 for introductory books to appear with Richard D Irwin publishing a college textbook on COBOL in 1966 190 By 1985 there were twice as many books on FORTRAN and four times as many on BASIC as on COBOL in the Library of Congress 128 University professors taught more modern state of the art languages and techniques instead of COBOL which was said to have a trade school nature 191 Donald Nelson chair of the CODASYL COBOL committee said in 1984 that academics hate COBOL and that computer science graduates had hate COBOL drilled into them 192 By the mid 1980s there was also significant condescension towards COBOL in the business community from users of other languages for example FORTRAN or assembler implying that COBOL could be used only for non challenging problems 193 In 2003 COBOL featured in 80 of information systems curricula in the United States the same proportion as C and Java 194 Ten years later a poll by Micro Focus found that 20 of university academics thought COBOL was outdated or dead and that 55 believed their students thought COBOL was outdated or dead The same poll also found that only 25 of academics had COBOL programming on their curriculum even though 60 thought they should teach it 195 Concerns about the design process edit Doubts have been raised about the competence of the standards committee Short term committee member Howard Bromberg said that there was little control over the development process and that it was plagued by discontinuity of personnel and a lack of talent 80 Jean Sammet and Jerome Garfunkel also noted that changes introduced in one revision of the standard would be reverted in the next due as much to changes in who was in the standard committee as to objective evidence 196 COBOL standards have repeatedly suffered from delays COBOL 85 arrived five years later than hoped 197 COBOL 2002 was five years late 2 and COBOL 2014 was six years late 100 198 To combat delays the standard committee allowed the creation of optional addenda which would add features more quickly than by waiting for the next standard revision However some committee members raised concerns about incompatibilities between implementations and frequent modifications of the standard 199 Influences on other languages edit COBOL s data structures influenced subsequent programming languages Its record and file structure influenced PL I and Pascal and the REDEFINES clause was a predecessor to Pascal s variant records Explicit file structure definitions preceded the development of database management systems and aggregated data was a significant advance over Fortran s arrays 128 PICTURE data declarations were incorporated into PL I with minor changes COBOL s COPY facility although considered primitive 200 influenced the development of include directives 128 The focus on portability and standardization meant programs written in COBOL could be portable and facilitated the spread of the language to a wide variety of hardware platforms and operating systems 201 Additionally the well defined division structure restricts the definition of external references to the Environment Division which simplifies platform changes in particular 202 See also edit nbsp Computer programming portal Alphabetical list of programming languages BLIS COBOL CODASYL Comparison of programming languages Generational list of programming languages COBOL based List of compilers COBOL compilersNotes edit Specifically influenced COBOL 2002 s object oriented features 2 3 4 The tombstone is currently at the Computer History Museum 63 a b The reader should be cautioned that although the 1997 Gartner Group study is referenced ubiquitously with a famous 200 billion lines of COBOL quote the actual report is difficult to find 203 Moreover some speculate 204 that the only involvement of Gartner in these numbers was the 1995 study 205 which projected that fixing the Y2K bug would cost 1 per line or 300 billion total which caused the misinterpretation of the report Vendor specific extensions cause many implementations to have far more one implementation recognizes over 1 100 keywords 125 References editCitations edit a b Sammet Jean E March 2000 The real creators of Cobol IEEE Software 17 2 30 32 doi 10 1109 52 841602 ISSN 1937 4194 The Short Range Committee worked diligently from June 1959 on but there were great difficulties in having a fairly large committee try to create a programming language In November the Short Range Committee chair appointed six people to develop specifications for consideration William Selden and Gertrude Tierney IBM Howard Bromberg and Norman Discount RCA and Vernon Reeves and Jean E Sammet Sylvania Electric Products We worked for two full weeks including some round the clock sessions in November 1959 and sent the proposed specifications to the full Short Range Committee which accepted almost all of them After some editing by the same six people we turned in the specifications as a final report in December to the Executive Committee which accepted them in January 1960 After some further editing the Government Printing Office issued Cobol 60 Grace Hopper did not participate in its work except through the general guidance she gave to her staff who were direct committee members Thus while her indirect influence was very important regrettably the frequent repeated statements that Grace Hopper developed Cobol or Grace Hopper was a codeveloper of Cobol or Grace Hopper is the mother of Cobol are just not correct a b c Saade Henry Wallace Ann October 1995 COBOL 97 A Status Report Dr Dobb s Journal Archived from the original on 22 April 2014 Retrieved 21 April 2014 a b Arranga Edmund C Coyle Frank P February 1998 Object Oriented COBOL Cambridge University Press p 15 ISBN 978 0132611404 Object Oriented COBOL s style reflects the influence of Smalltalk and C Arranga Edmund C Coyle Frank P March 1997 Cobol Perception and Reality Computer 30 3 127 doi 10 1109 2 573683 ISSN 0018 9162 Imajo Tetsuji et al September 2000 COBOL Script a business oriented scripting language Enterprise Distributed Object Computing Conference Makuhari Japan IEEE doi 10 1109 EDOC 2000 882363 ISBN 0769508650 Ho Wing Hong 7 May 2007 Introduction to EGL PDF IBM Software Group Archived from the original PDF on 13 January 2019 Retrieved 12 January 2019 Radin George 1978 Wexelblat Richard L ed The early history and characteristics of PL I History of Programming Languages Academic Press published 1981 p 572 doi 10 1145 800025 1198410 ISBN 0127450408 What is PL B The Programming Language for Business sysmaker com Infopro Inc Retrieved 22 April 2022 conversion to an alternate extended COBOL or to ANSI COBOL is very difficult if at all possible a b c Mitchell Robert L 4 October 2006 Cobol Not Dead Yet Computerworld Retrieved 27 April 2014 Mitchell Robert L 14 March 2012 Brain drain Where Cobol systems go from here Computerworld Retrieved 9 February 2015 Ensmenger Nathan L 2009 The Computer Boys Take Over Computers Programmers and the Politics of Technical Expertise MIT Press p 100 ISBN 978 0262050937 LCCN 2009052638 ISO IEC JTC 1 SC 22 WG 4 2023 Ferguson Andrew A History of Computer Programming Languages cs brown edu Retrieved 12 March 2018 COmmon Business Oriented Language Groenfeldt Tom Covid Accelerates Banks Mainframe Migration to Cloud Forbes Beyer 2009 p 282 Gurer Denise 1 June 2002 Pioneering Women in Computer Science SIGCSE Bull 34 2 175 180 doi 10 1145 543812 543853 ISSN 0097 8418 S2CID 2577644 Beyer 2009 pp 281 282 Sammet 1978a p 200 Flahive Paul 24 May 2019 How COBOL Still Powers The Global Economy At 60 Years Old Texas Public Radio Archived from the original on 24 May 2019 Retrieved 19 July 2019 Grace Hopper Nicknamed Grandma Cobol the code was based on some of her earlier work She said after hearing the rumors one of her collaborators went out and bought a granite tombstone He had the word COBOL cut in the front of it Then he shipped it express collect to Mr Phillips in the pentagon The prank on Charles Phillips a leader for the project at the defense department got the attention of the powers that be and was a turning point she said COBOL would go on to become the most widely used and longest lasting computer languages in history Beyer 2009 p 283 Beyer 2009 p 284 Early Meetings of the Conference on Data Systems Languages IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 7 4 316 325 1985 doi 10 1109 MAHC 1985 10047 S2CID 35625728 a b c d e Sammet 2004 p 104 Beyer 2009 p 286 a b Conner 1984 p ID 9 Sammet 1978a p 201 a b c d Bemer 1971 p 132 Beyer 2009 p 288 Sammet 1978a p 203 CODASYL 1969 I 2 1 1 Sammet 1978a p 204 CODASYL 1969 I 1 2 Beyer 2009 p 290 Sammet Jean 1978 The Early History of COBOL ACM SIGPLAN Notices 13 8 121 161 doi 10 1145 960118 808378 S2CID 10743643 Sammet 1978a p 217 Adams Vicki Porter 5 October 1981 Captain Grace M Hopper the Mother of COBOL InfoWorld Vol 3 no 20 p 33 ISSN 0199 6649 Betts Mitch 6 January 1992 Grace Hopper mother of Cobol dies Computerworld 26 1 14 Lohr Steve 2008 Go To The Story of the Math Majors Bridge Players Engineers Chess Wizards Maverick Scientists and Iconoclasts The Programmers Who Created the Software Revolution Basic Books p 52 ISBN 978 0786730766 Pioneering software engineer and Cobol co designer The Irish Times a b Beyer 2009 p 292 Bemer 1971 p 131 Beyer 2009 p 296 Sammet 1978a p 221 Beyer 2009 p 291 Oral History of Captain Grace Hopper PDF Computer History Museum December 1980 p 37 Archived from the original PDF on 25 December 2017 Retrieved 28 June 2014 Sammet 1978a p 218 Marcotty 1978a p 268 Sammet 1978a pp 205 206 a b Sammet 1978a Figure 8 Sammet 1978a pp 230 231 ISO IEC JTC 1 SC 22 WG 4 2001 p 846 Sammet 1978a p 220 Sammet 1978a p 228 Sammet 1978a p 210 Bemer 1971 p 132 We can t find a single individual who admits coining the acronym COBOL Sammet 1978a p 210 The next day the name COBOL was finally agreed to as an acronym for COmmon Business Oriented Language Unfortunately my notes do not show who made that suggestion Sullivan Patricia 25 June 2004 Computer Pioneer Bob Bemer 84 The Washington Post p B06 Retrieved 28 June 2014 THE COBOL REPORT Interview with Bob Bemer the Father of COBOL Archived from the original on 2 April 2018 THE COBOL REPORT Interview with Bob Bemer the Father of COBOL Archived from the original on 23 December 2003 Beyer 2009 p 293 Beyer 2009 p 294 COBOL Tombstone Computer History Museum 1960 Retrieved 29 June 2014 The Story of the COBOL Tombstone PDF The Computer Museum Report 13 8 9 Summer 1985 Archived PDF from the original on 3 April 2014 Retrieved 29 June 2014 Bemer 1971 p 130 Beyer 2009 p 289 CODASYL 1969 I 1 1 Brown 1976 p 47 a b c Bemer 1971 p 133 a b Beyer 2009 p 297 Williams Kathleen Broome 10 November 2012 Grace Hopper Admiral of the Cyber Sea US Naval Institute Press ISBN 978 1612512655 OCLC 818867202 Compaq Computer Corporation Compaq COBOL Reference Manual Order Number AA Q2G0F TK October 2000 Page xviii Fujitsu Corporation Net Cobol Language Reference Version 15 January 2009 IBM Corporation Enterprise COBOL for z OS Language Reference Version 4 Release 1 SC23 8528 00 December 2007 Garfunkel Jerome 11 November 1984 In defense of Cobol Computerworld 18 24 ID 19 Pratt Terrence W 1975 Programming Languages Design and Implementation Englewood Cliffs New Jersey Prentice Hall pp 361 362 381 382 ISBN 0 13 730432 3 a b Bemer 1971 p 134 Brown 1976 p 48 CODASYL 1969 I 2 2 4 CODASYL 1969 I 2 3 a b c d Follet Robert H Sammet Jean E 2003 Programming language standards In Ralston Anthony Reilly Edwin D Hemmendinger David eds Encyclopedia of Computer Science 4th ed Wiley p 1467 ISBN 978 0470864128 a b Beyer 2009 p 301 a b Brown 1976 p 49 Brown 1976 p 52 Taylor Alan 2 August 1972 Few Realise Wasted Resources of Local DP Schools Computerworld 6 31 11 Triance J M 1974 Programming in COBOL A Course of Twelve Television Lectures Manchester University Press p 87 ISBN 978 0719005923 Klein 2010 p 16 Baird George N Oliver Paul May 1977 1974 Standard X3 23 1974 Programming Language Standards Who Needs Them PDF Report Department of the Navy pp 19 21 Archived PDF from the original on 7 January 2014 Retrieved 7 January 2014 Culleton John R Jr 23 July 1975 Spotty Availability A Problem Computerworld 9 30 17 Simmons Williams B 18 June 1975 Does Cobol s Report Writer Really Miss the Mark Computerworld 9 25 20 Shoor Rita 26 January 1981 User Threatens Suit Over Ansi Cobol 80 Computerworld 15 4 1 8 Shoor Rita 26 October 1981 DPMA Takes Stand Against Cobol Draft Computerworld 15 43 1 2 a b c Gallant John 16 September 1985 Revised Cobol standard may be ready in late 85 Computerworld 19 37 1 8 a b Expert addresses Cobol 85 standard Computerworld 19 37 41 48 16 September 1985 Paul Lois 15 March 1982 Responses to Cobol 80 Overwhelmingly Negative Computerworld 16 11 1 5 Paul Lois 25 April 1983 Study Sees Few Problems Switching to Cobol 8X Computerworld 17 17 1 6 Gillin Paul 19 November 1984 DEC users get head start implementing Cobol 80 Computerworld 18 47 1 6 ClearPath Enterprise Servers April 2015 COBOL ANSI 85 Programming Reference Manual PDF public support unisys com Unisys Retrieved 29 April 2022 Garfunkel 1987 p 150 Roy M K Dastidar D Ghost 1 June 1989 Features of COBOL 85 COBOL Programming Problems and Solutions 2nd ed McGraw Hill Education pp 438 451 ISBN 978 0074603185 Robinson Brian 9 July 2009 Cobol remains old standby at agencies despite showing its age FCW Public Sector Media Group Archived from the original on 27 April 2014 Retrieved 26 April 2014 a b COBOL Standards Micro Focus Archived from the original on 31 March 2004 Retrieved 2 September 2014 NetCOBOL for Net netcobol com GTSoftware 2013 Archived from the original on 8 July 2014 Retrieved 29 January 2014 A list of Codasyl Cobol features Computerworld 18 37 ID 28 10 September 1984 Retrieved 8 June 2014 ISO IEC JTC 1 SC 22 WG 4 2001 Annex F Klein 2010 p 21 a b JTC1 SC22 WG4 COBOL ISO 30 June 2010 Archived from the original on 14 February 2014 Retrieved 27 April 2014 Billman John Klink Huib 27 February 2008 Thoughts on the Future of COBOL Standardization PDF Archived from the original PDF on 11 July 2009 Retrieved 14 August 2014 ISO IEC JTC 1 SC 22 WG 4 2014 Annex E Schricker Don 2 December 1998 J4 COBOL Standardization Micro Focus Archived from the original on 24 February 1999 Retrieved 12 July 2014 a b c ISO IEC JTC 1 SC 22 WG 4 2023 E 3 1 a b c d e ISO IEC JTC 1 SC 22 WG 4 2023 E 3 2 ISO IEC JTC 1 SC 22 WG 4 2023 12 4 4 9 ISO IEC JTC 1 SC 22 WG 4 2023 8 7 2 Kizior Ronald J Carr Donald Halpern Paul Does COBOL Have a Future PDF The Proceedings of the Information Systems Education Conference 2000 17 126 Archived from the original PDF on 17 August 2016 Retrieved 30 September 2012 White Doug 12 July 1998 Frequently Asked Questions FAQ About the Y2K Problem homepages wmich edu Archived from the original on 7 November 2021 Retrieved 29 April 2022 Thus the main problem of Y2K is the problem of incorrect results when date mathematics are conducted Kappelman Leon A 2000 Some strategic Y2K blessings IEEE Software 17 2 42 46 doi 10 1109 52 841605 Carr amp Kizior 2003 p 16 Carr amp Kizior 2003 p 10 Cobol brain drain Survey results Computerworld 14 March 2012 Retrieved 27 April 2014 Powner David A 25 May 2016 Federal Agencies Need to Address Aging Legacy Systems PDF Government Accountability Office p 18 Archived from the original PDF on 15 June 2016 Retrieved 19 July 2019 Several agencies such as the Department of Agriculture USDA DHS HHS Justice Treasury and VA reported using Common Business Oriented Language COBOL a programming language developed in the late 1950s and early 1960s to program their legacy systems It is widely known that agencies need to move to more modern maintainable languages as appropriate and feasible COBOL blues Reuters Retrieved 8 April 2020 Teplitzky Phil 25 October 2019 Closing the COBOL Programming Skills Gap IBM Systems Magazine IBM Z Archived from the original on 13 April 2020 Retrieved 11 June 2020 Lee Alicia 8 April 2020 Wanted urgently People who know a half century old computer language so states can process unemployment claims CNN Retrieved 8 April 2020 Long Heather Stein Jeff Rein Lisa Romm Tony 17 April 2020 Stimulus checks and other coronavirus relief hindered by dated technology and rocky government rollout The Washington Post Retrieved 19 April 2020 ISO IEC JTC 1 SC 22 WG 4 2014 8 9 Reserved Words Table Micro Focus Visual COBOL 2 2 COBOL Language Reference Micro Focus Retrieved 3 March 2014 ISO IEC JTC 1 SC 22 WG 4 2014 8 3 1 2 ISO IEC JTC 1 SC 22 WG 4 2014 8 3 2 a b c d Shneiderman 1985 p 349 McCracken 1976 pp 2 6 9 a b ISO IEC JTC 1 SC 22 WG 4 2001 F 2 ISO IEC JTC 1 SC 22 WG 4 2014 D 18 2 ISO IEC JTC 1 SC 22 WG 4 2014 D 18 ISO IEC JTC 1 SC 22 WG 4 2014 p 108 ISO IEC JTC 1 SC 22 WG 4 2014 p 896 ISO IEC JTC 1 SC 22 WG 4 2014 D 2 1 File Organizations File Handling Micro Focus 1998 Archived from the original on 4 March 2016 Retrieved 27 June 2014 ISO IEC JTC 1 SC 22 WG 4 2014 8 5 1 2 Cutler 2014 Appendix A Hubbell Thane 1999 Sams Teach Yourself COBOL in 24 hours SAMS Publishing p 40 ISBN 978 0672314537 LCCN 98087215 McCracken amp Golden 1988 19 9 Cutler 2014 5 8 5 ISO IEC JTC 1 SC 22 WG 4 2014 8 5 2 a b ISO IEC JTC 1 SC 22 WG 4 2014 14 9 24 ISO IEC JTC 1 SC 22 WG 4 2014 14 9 35 ISO IEC JTC 1 SC 22 WG 4 2014 13 18 40 ISO IEC JTC 1 SC 22 WG 4 2014 13 18 60 3 ISO IEC JTC 1 SC 22 WG 4 2014 p 855 a b McCracken 1976 p 338 ISO IEC JTC 1 SC 22 WG 4 2014 14 4 ISO IEC JTC 1 SC 22 WG 4 2014 14 6 3 Field John Ramalingam G September 1999 Identifying Procedural Structure in Cobol Programs PDF PASTE 99 doi 10 1145 381788 316163 ISBN 1581131372 Archived PDF from the original on 24 December 2010 a b c Veerman Niels Verhoeven Ernst Jan November 2006 Cobol minefield detection PDF Software Practice and Experience 36 14 doi 10 1002 spe v36 14 S2CID 18619757 Archived from the original PDF on 6 March 2007 ISO IEC JTC 1 SC 22 WG 4 2014 14 9 ISO IEC JTC 1 SC 22 WG 4 2014 14 9 4 14 9 22 ISO IEC JTC 1 SC 22 WG 4 2014 D 6 5 2 2 ISO IEC JTC 1 SC 22 WG 4 2014 14 9 13 1 ISO IEC JTC 1 SC 22 WG 4 2014 14 9 35 1 ISO IEC JTC 1 SC 22 WG 4 2014 p 899 a b McCracken amp Golden 1988 8 4 Examples of compiler support for ALTER can be seen in the following Tiffin Brian 18 September 2013 September 2013 GNU Cobol Archived from the original on 5 May 2014 Retrieved 5 January 2014 The ALTER Statement Micro Focus Visual COBOL 2 2 for Visual Studio 2013 COBOL Language Reference Micro Focus Retrieved 5 January 2014 ALTER Statement Nucleus PDF COBOL85 Reference Manual Fujitsu November 1996 p 555 Archived from the original PDF on 6 January 2014 Retrieved 5 January 2014 ALTER Statement Enterprise COBOL for z OS Language Reference IBM June 2013 Retrieved 5 January 2014 ISO IEC JTC 1 SC 22 WG 4 2001 F 1 a b McCracken 1976 p 355 Moseley Jay 17 January 2015 COBOL Compiler from MVT Retrieved 19 July 2015 Dijkstra Edsger W 18 June 1975 How do we tell truths that might hurt University of Texas at Austin EWD498 Archived from the original on 2 May 2017 Retrieved 29 August 2007 Tompkins H E 1983 In defense of teaching structured COBOL as computer science ACM SIGPLAN Notices 18 4 86 94 doi 10 1145 948176 948186 S2CID 33803213 a b Riehle 1992 p 125 Shneiderman 1985 pp 349 350 Coughlan Michael 16 March 2014 Beginning COBOL for Programmers Apress p 4 ISBN 978 1430262534 Retrieved 13 August 2014 Sammet 1978b p 258 Riehle 1992 p 126 Riehle 1992 p 127 COBOL and Legacy Code as a Systemic Risk naked capitalism 19 July 2016 Retrieved 23 July 2016 Lammel Ralf Verhoef Chris November December 2001 Cracking the 500 language problem PDF IEEE Software 18 6 79 doi 10 1109 52 965809 hdl 1871 9853 Archived from the original PDF on 19 August 2014 Howkins T J Harandi M T April 1979 Towards more portable COBOL The Computer Journal 22 4 290 doi 10 1093 comjnl 22 4 290 Garfunkel 1987 p 11 Garfunkel 1987 p 15 Raymond Eric S 1 October 2004 COBOL The Jargon File version 4 4 8 Archived from the original on 30 August 2014 Retrieved 13 December 2014 Brown 1976 p 53 CODASYL 1969 II 1 1 Shneiderman 1985 p 350 Sammet 1961 p 381 a b Conner 1984 p ID 10 Marcotty 1978a p 263 Conner 1984 p ID 14 Sammet 1961 p 380 Marcotty 1978a p 266 Sammet 1978b p 255 Shneiderman 1985 pp 348 349 Conway Richard Gries David 1973 An Introduction to Programming A Structured Approach using PL 1 and PL C Cambridge Massachusetts Winthrop Publishers p 341 ISBN 0 87626 405 4 COBOL Logic and Programming third edition 1974 Archived from the original on 5 March 2016 Retrieved 25 February 2016 Shneiderman 1985 p 351 An interview Cobol defender Computerworld 18 37 ID 29 ID 32 10 September 1984 Retrieved 8 June 2014 Pratt Terrence W Zelkowitz Marvin V 1984 Programming Languages Design and Implementation 2nd ed Englewood Cliffs N J Prentice Hall ISBN 0136780121 Carr amp Kizior 2003 p 13 Academia needs more support to tackle the IT skills gap Press release Micro Focus 7 March 2013 Retrieved 4 August 2014 Sammet Jean Garfunkel Jerome October 1985 Summary of Changes in COBOL 1960 1985 Annals of the History of Computing 7 4 342 doi 10 1109 MAHC 1985 10033 S2CID 17940092 Cook Margaret M June 1978 Ghosh Sakti P Liu Leonard Y eds Data Base Facility for COBOL 80 PDF 1978 National Computer Conference Anaheim California AFIPS Press pp 1107 1112 doi 10 1109 AFIPS 1978 63 LCCN 55 44701 Retrieved 2 September 2014 The earliest date that a new COBOL standard could be developed and approved is the year 1980 Resolutions from WG4 meeting 24 June 26 28 2003 Las Vegas Nevada USA 11 July 2003 p 1 Archived from the original doc on 8 March 2016 Retrieved 29 June 2014 a June 2008 revision of the COBOL standard Babcock Charles 14 July 1986 Cobol standard add ons flayed Computerworld 20 28 1 12 Marcotty 1978b p 274 This can be seen in Visual COBOL IBM PartnerWorld IBM 21 August 2013 Archived from the original on 12 July 2014 Retrieved 5 February 2014 Micro Focus Visual COBOL delivers the next generation of COBOL development and deployment for Linux x86 64 Linux for System z AIX HP UX Solaris and Windows COBOL Compilers family ibm com IBM Archived from the original on 23 February 2014 Retrieved 5 February 2014 Tiffin Brian 4 January 2014 What platforms are supported by GNU Cobol Archived from the original on 14 December 2013 Retrieved 5 February 2014 Coughlan Michael 2002 Introduction to COBOL Archived from the original on 5 March 2023 Gartner Group Studies 1997 2001 state gov Year 2000 Program Management Office 2000 Retrieved 23 April 2022 Engelmann Viktor 8 April 2021 COBOL Fact Check cobsolete de COBSOLETE Retrieved 23 April 2022 What Will the Future Hold CIO International Data Group 15 December 1995 1 January 1996 p 82 Sources edit Bemer Bob 1971 A View of the History of COBOL PDF Honeywell Computer Journal 5 3 Archived from the original PDF on 22 January 2016 Retrieved 28 June 2014 Beyer Kurt 2009 Grace Hopper and the Invention of the Information Age MIT Press ISBN 978 0262013109 LCCN 2008044229 Brown William R 1 December 1976 COBOL In Belzer Jack Holzman Albert G Kent Allen eds Encyclopedia of Computer Science and Technology Volume 5 CRC Press ISBN 978 0824722555 Carr Donald E Kizior Ronald J 31 December 2003 Continued Relevance of COBOL in Business and Academia Current Situation and Comparison to the Year 2000 Study PDF Information Systems Education Journal 1 52 ISSN 1545 679X S2CID 62485945 Archived PDF from the original on 5 March 2023 Retrieved 4 August 2014 CODASYL July 1969 CODASYL COBOL Journal of Development 1968 National Bureau of Standards ISSN 0591 0218 LCCN 73601243 OL 14204153M Conner Richard L 14 May 1984 Cobol your age is showing Computerworld 18 20 ID 7 ID 18 ISSN 0010 4841 Cutler Gary 9 April 2014 GNU COBOL Programmer s Guide PDF 3rd ed Retrieved 25 February 2014 Garfunkel Jerome 1987 The COBOL 85 Example Book Wiley ISBN 978 0471804611 ISO IEC JTC 1 SC 22 WG 4 4 December 2001 ISO IEC IS 1989 2001 Programming language COBOL ISO Archived from the original ZIP of PDF on 24 January 2002 Retrieved 2 September 2014 Link goes to draft N 0147 ISO IEC JTC 1 SC 22 WG 4 31 October 2014 INCITS ISO IEC 1989 2014 2014 Programming language COBOL INCITS a href Template Cite book html title Template Cite book cite book a CS1 maint numeric names authors list link ISO IEC JTC 1 SC 22 WG 4 January 2023 ISO IEC 1989 2023 Programming language COBOL ISO a href Template Cite book html title Template Cite book cite book a CS1 maint numeric names authors list link Klein William M 4 October 2010 The History of COBOL PDF Archived from the original PDF on 7 January 2014 Retrieved 7 January 2014 Marcotty Michael 1978a Wexelblat Richard L ed Transcript of question and answer session History of Programming Languages Academic Press published 1981 p 263 doi 10 1145 800025 1198370 ISBN 0127450408 Marcotty Michael 1978b Wexelblat Richard L ed Full text of all questions submitted History of Programming Languages Academic Press published 1981 p 274 doi 10 1145 800025 1198371 ISBN 0127450408 McCracken Daniel D 1976 A Simplified Guide to Structured COBOL Programming Wiley ISBN 0 471 58284 0 LCCN 75044399 McCracken Daniel D Golden Donald G 1988 A Simplified Guide to Structured COBOL Programming 2nd ed Wiley ISBN 978 0471610540 LCCN 87034608 Riehle Richard L August 1992 PERFORM considered harmful Communications of the ACM 35 8 125 128 doi 10 1145 135226 376106 S2CID 18845698 Sammet Jean E May 1961 A method of combining ALGOL and COBOL Papers presented at the 9 11 May 1961 western joint IRE AIEE ACM computer conference ACM pp 379 387 doi 10 1145 1460690 1460734 Sammet Jean E 1978a Wexelblat Richard L ed The early history of COBOL History of Programming Languages Academic Press published 1981 doi 10 1145 800025 1198367 ISBN 0127450408 Sammet Jean E 1978b Wexelblat Richard L ed Transcript of presentation History of Programming Languages Academic Press published 1981 doi 10 1145 800025 1198368 ISBN 0127450408 Sammet Jean E 23 July 2004 COBOL In Reilly Edwin D ed Concise Encyclopedia of Computer Science Wiley ISBN 978 0470090954 OCLC 249810423 Shneiderman B October 1985 The Relationship Between COBOL and Computer Science Annals of the History of Computing 7 4 348 352 doi 10 1109 MAHC 1985 10041 S2CID 1009406 External links editCOBOL at Wikipedia s sister projects nbsp Definitions from Wiktionary nbsp Media from Commons nbsp Textbooks from Wikibooks nbsp Resources from Wikiversity nbsp Data from Wikidata COBOLStandard info at the Wayback Machine archived 2017 01 10 ISO IEC JTC1 SC22 WG4 COBOL at the Wayback Machine archived 2016 08 22 COBOL at Curlie COBOL Language Standard 1991 COBOL 85 with Amendment 1 from The Open Group Retrieved from https en wikipedia org w index php title COBOL amp oldid 1218153722, wikipedia, wiki, book, books, library,

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