& Subscribe to my Blog
* indicates required
/
The Structure of COBOL
Verbs, clauses, and sentences are among the structural elements of COBOL that resemble those of English. Because of its tight hierarchical
structure and readability, COBOL is easy to comprehend and maintain. You can grasp what a program is doing without having to learn a whole
new programming terminology.
Its detractors have undoubtedly existed. "The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offence," was a famous statement made by Edsgar Dijkstra in 1975. COBOL continued to be the
most widely used business language despite the fact that teaching it in universities declined as a result of this.
Common Business Oriented Language is referred to as COBOL. Developed as a standard business language, it was one of the earliest high-level
languages and was put together by a committee funded by the Department of Defense. This committee, which eventually became known as the Committee on Data Systems Languages, or CODASYL, created a "common business oriented language," based on IBM's COMTRAN and Univac's AIMACO in addition to Grace Hopper's FLOW-MATIC. After undergoing more changes, the
new language quickly overtook other languages as the standard for developing commercial systems, and it has stayed that way ever since.
COBOL is still widely used by many businesses, including as IBM, UPS, and Cigna. "The syntax is kept simple to allow non-programmers
("The Business") to read it and understand it," Mario Ceballos,
a software developer at Cigna, told me. The purpose of COBOL is to be explicit because assumptions shouldn't be allowed.
It can be difficult to locate someone with COBOL abilities
It can be difficult to locate someone with COBOL abilities, though. "The cost of the mainframe makes it a very challenging platform to
learn," Ceballos remarked. People lack the funds to pay for the leasing of a mainframe. Only a relatively tiny number of schools provide
COBOL and mainframe training. IBM stopped providing incentives for American schools to teach COBOL and mainframe courses when they began
outsourcing and working remotely.
Offshore talent became more accessible than onshore talent. Local talent will cost a lot when it comes to consultation costs.
What Keeps Cobol at the Top?
In some respects, COBOL"
is more restricted than other popular programming languages available today. For example,
it does not support dynamic memory allocation, nor does it provide easy access to operating system or specific computer
architecture low-level features. Recursion is not possible in the language's most widely used versions.
It would never be a good idea to design a COBOL compiler. A student of computer science who was exposed to COBOL would be horrified.
A category error has occurred. According to current parlance, COBOL is a language that is exclusive to the specific field of business
programming.
Robert Glass noted a number of reasons why COBOL is more appropriate for business programming than general-purpose languages, including:
A business-oriented language is required to define, manage, and work with heterogeneous data.
Business programs often combine floating-point, integer, decimal, and fixed-and variable-length strings
with variable components in complex record structures.
Database programmers are familiar with some of these issues, and object-relational mapping technologies often encounter these challenges.
True decimal data types must be used to manage business and financial data. Accounting systems need to accurately replicate the
outcomes of manual calculations, even down to the last decimal place. Using traditional floating-point numbers introduces complications
and mistakes.
A business-oriented language must be able to access and work with substantial volumes of externally maintained record-structured data.
Of course, general-purpose programming languages are capable of doing all of this. However, it is built into the language of COBOL.
We can argue over whether or not COBOL is necessary, but the truth is that there are hundreds of billions of
lines of COBOL in use, and efforts to switch to other programming languages have not always been effective.
BIO About the Author: Joseph P Fanning
Joe studied at Harvard. He owns Joepfanning.com and blogs alot about cool things and stuff. He co owns Business Process Automation
Phone - 201 334 8743
Email - Joe's App email
Suffolk County LI New York 11772 Bergen County NJ Programmer
Current date and time:
"I Worked with the ThomasNet team that ranked keywords "3d printer" for 4,000 clicks a month and "band saw" for 1,000 SEO clicks a month with a total of 300,000 SEO Clicks a month"
|
JSearch Search Engine Technology. Option 1 Get the code on Github. Select Option 2. Buy the Full Developer Edition
Home | About | App Services | | Terms | Contact App Careers | SiteMap Search Engine Commands | Privacy and Security"I Worked with the ThomasNet team that ranked keywords "3d printer" for 4,000 clicks a month and "band saw" for 1,000 SEO clicks a month with a total of 300,000 SEO Clicks a month"
|