Full form of COBOL
Common Business Oriented Language is the full form of COBOL. COBOL is an English-compiled programming language designed for commercial applications. It is procedural, imperative, and, since 2002, object-oriented. Governments and corporations mainly use COBOL in finance, industry, and administrative structures. COBOL is also commonly used in mainframe applications, including massive job and transaction processing.
Due to its declining success and the retirement of experienced COBOL programmers, the applications were adapted to different formats, updated in modern languages, or replaced by software programs. Much of COBOL programming is primarily to support current applications, although many large financial companies were still designing new COBOL programs in 2006, given the speed at which mainframes operate.
History of COBOL
- COBOL was discovered in the 1950s by Grace Hopper. Previously, each device manufacturer was expected to run the program using their own computer language.
- COBOL programs could run on computers other than one from different manufacturers, so the DOD (Department of Defense) quickly adopted them because they had to buy machines from different buyers.
- It has undergone several changes and updates since 1960.
- ANSI (American National Standards Institute) has produced several updates to COBOL, such as COBOL-68, COBOL-74, COBOL-85, and COBOL-2002.
- Therefore, the COBOL format is no longer accepted by modern devices and is called a Legacy Language.
- COBOL was mainly used in large organizations such as military, government, large companies. Also several banks in the US.
Required Skills to Operate COBOL
COBOL is in high demand because it has enormous lines of applications and codes. This old programming language is still in use by many companies, but there are only a few people who have the skills to operate COBOL. That is why it is essential to have other programming skills, like Java alongside COBOL, to maintain workability.
Why Do We Need COBOL?
We have COBOL meaning, having significant advantages. Because COBOL is still used for military, government, insurance, and bank applications, this is the best language to handle batch jobs, file accessing, sequential processing, and reporting. To put it simply, using this language is profitable.
Features of COBOL
- COBOL’s implementations are highly comprehensive.
- Long live COBOL applications.
- COBOL’s systems can handle massive amounts of data.
- Frameworks on COBOL are simple to understand.
- COBOL’s systems are portable, which means anybody can use them.
- COBOL’s applications can be managed.
- Enable both long names & term-connector characters that are up to Thirty characters.