COBOL Full Form

Full Form of COBOL

COBOL stands for Common Business Oriented Language is a program developed for business computer programs used in various industries like human resources, finances, computers, etc. It has been operational, imperative, and object-oriented since 2002. Governments and enterprises mostly employ COBOL in finance, industry, and administrative organizations. COBOL is also widely used in mainframe computer applications, such as large-scale task and transaction processing.

Applications have been changed to different forms, updated in modern languages, or replaced with software programs due to the declining success of COBOL and the departure of experienced COBOL programmers. Given the pace of mainframe operation, much of COBOL programming is now solely for supporting current applications, while several major financial companies were still building new COBOL systems in 2006.

History of COBOL

Grace Hopper was the first to discover COBOL in the 1950s. In 1959, COBOL-60 was designed in the Data systems language, and in 1962 IBM (International Business Machines) announced COBOL as their primary language. In 1968, a standard version of COBOL was accepted by the American National Standards Institute. Then by 1970, COBOL was accepted worldwide for commercial use. 

Since 1960, it has undergone various revisions and modifications. COBOL-68, COBOL-74, COBOL-85, and COBOL-2002 are some of the COBOL modifications created by the ANSI (American National Standards Institute). As a result, the COBOL format is no longer supported by modern devices, and it is referred to as a Legacy Language. COBOL is primarily employed in large organizations such as the army, government, large corporations, and a few banks in the United States.

Features of COBOL

1. COBOL is a standard language that is simple to learn and can be compiled and run on a variety of machines. It has a clean coding style and supports a large syntactic vocabulary. 
2. The system is portable and easy to use. 
3. COBOL’s sophisticated file management capabilities allow it to deal with massive amounts of data.
4. COBOL is suitable for a wide range of tasks, including batch reporting and complex transactions.
5. COBOL has evolved over six decades of corporate evolution and is compatible with a wide range of systems and devices. 
6. COBOL’s logical control mechanisms make it simple to read, alter, and debug.
7. The applications of COBOL have a long life span.
8. COBOL allows word connector characters.

Prior to COBOL, each operating system had its own programming language. This was difficult for companies that employed a variety of computer brands, such as the US Department of Defence, that supported the COBOL project. COBOL swiftly became one of the most popular widely used programming languages due to its ease of use and portability. Despite the fact that COBOL is usually regarded as obsolete, it has the highest number of active lines of code of any programming language.

COBOL is still utilized by financial institutions and government bodies today. COBOL is once again being taught in several colleges, this time to assist application modernization and the DevOps movement, despite the fact that the number of programmers with COBOL experience continuously shrinks as people who learned COBOL when it was popular enter retirement age. Rising salaries and novel training opportunities have resulted from the increased demand for COBOL programmers. Through fellowships and training programs, IBM has educated over 150,000 developers on COBOL and mainframe capabilities over the last decade. 

While many firms continue to use COBOL and training is increasing, the lack of skills and cumbersome text-based code is being replaced or combined with more modern coding languages like Java, NET, and C++. Because these systems are generally run on old mainframes that are difficult to replace, and because of the sheer volume of code still in use, this can be a laborious and costly procedure. In fact, up to 75% of legacy COBOL system rewrite initiatives fail owing to cost, time, and difficulties.

Advantages of COBOL

• COBOL is the finest language for batch jobs, file access, sequential processing, and reporting
• It is still used in military applications, government applications, insurance applications, and bank applications
• COBOL leads to a lot of great career opportunities
• COBOL data type includes Alphabetic, pointer, alphanumeric, object, numeric, national, index, and Boolean 

Conclusion

COBOL is a high-level programming language that is mostly used in corporate applications. It is the second-oldest programming language, after FORTRAN.

COBOL is mostly used in business and government trading, finance, and administrative systems.

COBOL is still commonly used in mainframe-based legacy systems, such as large-scale batch and transaction processing operations. However, because of the retirement of experienced COBOL programmers, its popularity is waning, and programs are transferring to the new platform.

Different versions of COBOL are COBOL-68, COBOL-74, COBOL-85, and COBOL-2002. Programs are being transferred to other platforms, rewritten in current languages, or replaced with software packages as COBOL’s prominence fades and skilled COBOL programmers retire. The majority of COBOL programming is currently used to maintain existing applications; but, as late as 2006, many large financial institutions were still using COBOL to construct new systems.