Category:COBOL

Execution method:	Compiled (machine code)
Garbage collected:	No
Parameter passing methods:	By reference, By value
Type safety:	Strong
Type strength:	Strong;
Type expression:	Explicit
Type checking:	Static
Lang tag(s):	cobol
See Also:	COBOL on the HOPL; BNF Grammar for COBOL; COBOL compared to other languages;

COBOL, an acronym for 'COmmon Business Oriented Language', is one of the oldest programming languages, being created in 1959. It was designed by a CODASYL (Conference on Data System Languages) committee with Grace Hopper. It is primarily used in business, finance and administration for companies and governments. It is primarily an imperative, structured language, with support for object-oriented programming added in 2002.

Versions

COBOL 60 was the first version of the language.
COBOL-65 added some new features to the original specification.
COBOL-68 is the first COBOL standard and was published by ANSI. It was created to improve compatibility between the different versions of the language.
COBOL-74 added a few more features to the language, including the ability to ACCEPT the date, day and time, and the file organization clause.
COBOL-85 added many new features to COBOL, notably including: excplicit scope terminators (END-IF, END-READ, etc.), the EVALUATE verb, the CONTINUE verb, inline PERFORM statements, the ability to pass arguments by content, and the deprecation of the infamous ALTER verb. This standard was followed by the intrinsic functions amendment and a clarifications amendment in 1989 and 1991, respectively.
X/Open COBOL was a technical standard published by the X/Open Group in 1991 to facilitate uniformity of implementations and program portability. Based on COBOL-85, it excluded much of its optional modules and obsolete features, and also specified some common non-ANSI extensions that would later become incorporated into the standard, such as the screen section for TUI programming, and record locking.^[1]
COBOL 2002 was published by ISO as ISO/IEC 1989. It included a host of new features, most notably including object-oriented programming. However, there were also other features, including: floating-point support, portable arithmetic results, pointers, calling conventions to other languages, function prototypes, XML facilities and support for execution within framework environments. This standard has suffered from poor vendor support, due to little commercial demand for the new features.^[2]
COBOL 2014 was published on July 8th, 2014 and accepted by ISO early that summer, and then adopted by ANSI on Oct 31st, 2014.^[3] It includes numeric definitions following the IEEE 754 standard.
COBOL 2023 is the latest version of the standard, adopted in January 2023. It includes the standardizations of many previously nonstandard extensions, including transaction processing, asynchronous messaging, line sequential file organization, enhanced string manipulation, boolean shifting operators and a sleep statement.

References

Subcategories

This category has the following 3 subcategories, out of 3 total.

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Pages in category "COBOL"

The following 173 pages are in this category, out of 373 total.

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[1] X/Open. Technical Standard: COBOL Language. https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009680799/toc.pdf.

[2] John Billman & Huib Klink. Thoughts on the Future of COBOL Standardization. https://web.archive.org/web/20090711032647/http://www.cobolstandard.info/j4/files/08-0034.pdf.

[3] ISO/IEC 1989:2014 Information technology – Programming languages, their environments and system software interfaces – Programming language COBOL. https://www.iso.org/iso/home/store/catalogue_tc/catalogue_detail.htm?csnumber=51416.

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