Common Business Oriented Language

Common Business Oriented Language

Common Business Oriented Language

Introduction

Back in 1959, a committee CODASYL developed a programming language with the aim to facilitate the developing business industry. The name COBOL (Common Business Oriented Language) highlights the sole purpose of its creation. COBOL is one of the oldest in the hierarchy of high level languages. This paper presents an overview of its features and evaluates some general technical concerns regarding the performance of COBOL.

Discussion

Salient Features

The language justifies the two major reasons for its existence. The committee wanted to make COBOL very common. Secondly, COBOL would be specifically used to produce data-processing applications rather than to develop certain scientific applications(ISSC & Walker, 2004). COBOL mostly uses words from English language rather than complicated codes representing a function. For instance, typing "ADD" performs addition. The language works on any system which has its compiler. This makes it easy and adaptive for masses working in business environments. Even today, people appreciate COBOL for the capability of managing huge volumes of data efficiently (Koch & Geoff, 2007). Some renowned organizations still use COBOL in one way or the other. There are 343 million code lines of COBOL working to assist the banking related processes in Bank of New York (Mitchell, 2012).

Issues

COBOL is a simple language which makes it easy to comprehend. COBOL is secure due to its simplicity and targeted scope. However, some of the experts fear potential security threats when connecting it to the web. Mainly because the transition process involves less secure platforms compared to mainframes (Radcliff & Deborah,2000).Besides, the tools to integrate COBOL to the web are being developed and modified to fight the potential security risks(Swaine & Michael,2008).

Like C++, COBOL is a compiled language. The language sometimes brings in complexity during compilation of the programs. The syntax to call email functions varies from compiler ...