Why did COBOL become the standard programming language?

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 US Department of Defense effort to create a portable programming language for data processing….COBOL.

Why COBOL is still used today?

Built for business and, of course, the Mainframe The approach of taking data, ingesting it into the mainframe computer, having that mainframe process the data and then get the output from it, is still the dominant use case for many COBOL applications. They run as a “job” either scheduled or on-demand.

Is COBOL a good language for business applications?

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.

What are the main weaknesses of COBOL?

COBOL has been criticized throughout its life for its verbosity, design process, and poor support for structured programming. These weaknesses result in monolithic, verbose (intended to be English-like) programs that are not easily comprehensible.

What is the difference between COBOL and modern syntax?

In contrast with modern, succinct syntax like y = x;, COBOL has a more English-like syntax (in this case, MOVE x TO y ). COBOL code is split into four divisions (identification, environment, data, and procedure) containing a rigid hierarchy of sections, paragraphs and sentences.

How many times has COBOL been revised?

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.