Wednesday, September 2, 2009

COBOL Design Features

Posted by KK at 11:22 PM


  • COBOL was first developed in
    1959. It was the second compiled language. (The first was FORTRAN.)
  • COBOL was designed to solve
    business problems, something its predecessor wasn't very good at, eg.
    FORTRAN couldn't do alphabetic sorts or keep monetary values in even
    cents.
  • COBOL was designed to be
    English-like, so that the reader, even a non-programmer, could get an idea
    of what was going on in the program, simply by reading the code.
  • COBOL was designed to be
    portable, so that programs could be adapted from one computer system to
    run on another, simply by making a few changes in one isolated section of
    the code.