COBOL programming language

COBOL

BRIEF INTRODUCTION

COBOL an acronym of “COmmon Business Oriented Language” is basically one the earliest versions of programming languages previously used for many administrative, business and finance sectors of organizations, in fact, the second oldest business language as the oldest one was FORTRAN (FORmula TRANslator). It was basically a high level programming language developed by a joint venture of American government and private sector named “Conference on Data Systems Languages” (CODASYL) during the second half of 1959. For the first time, it was used in Univac 1. Then after some time, this language got obsolete. Time by the time its various versions were developed and still it's in use, in some organizations but the larger part of organizations use other languages such as Java and C language which are proved to me more efficient, easy and provides a large range of options than COBOL.

DISCUSSION

HISTORY

Grace Hopper did the pioneering work on COBOL, who developed program compilers for the first large-scale digital computer, the Mark 1. Its first compilers were introduced and implemented by a group of some university students, some private industry professionals and majorly US Government in 1960. Since then, it went through a lot of changes specifications and improvements to remove the incompatibility issues. Than at 1968, the previous version of COBOL got transformed to “ANS COBOL”, where "American National Standard Institute" (ANSI) tried their level best to rectify those limitations and mistakes which was present on previous versions, as it was the first standard version by far. Than in 1974 it was modified more due to the increasing number of desired demands regarding technology and efficiency. This effort again was done by ANSI and tried to make it compatible with the current needs. At 1985, ANSI launched another revised version of COBOL with more positive features ...