Behind the Legacy Language: COBOL

by | Sep 15, 2012 | main

COmmon Business-Oriented Language, popularly-known as COBOL, has been around for almost 5 decades. However, the use and support for the software still remains active. COBOL is a product of the shared initiatives of several government offices and computer manufacturers of its day, in the hope of developing a sophisticated language for business, finance and administrative systems and to utilize the technological hardware and software designs available during the time COBOL’s use was at its peak. COBOL, through the years, has developed a massive fan base of computer manufacturers, programmers and users, and is still being considered as one of the most widely used computer languages by: * government agencies * military offices * commercial enterprises * educational institutions * Operating systems such as Microsoft Windows, IBM, as well as Unix and Linux. There are many reasons why people coming from various sectors of private and government institutions prefer using COBOL over other computer languages, even today. 1. COBOL has been a language-of-choice for business, financial and administrative systems worldwide. 2. COBOL is capable of dealing with a diverse set of processing procedures. 3. COBOL is one of the most widely used computer languages for computer interaction or client-server communication. 4. Throughout the years COBOL has developed a very large user base and hundreds and thousands of programmers have been immersed in the COBOL language. A number of programmers are capable of providing support and maintenance for systems developed using the COBOL language. 5. A lot of mission-critical business systems around the world have been developed using the COBOL language. 6. COBOL is very easy to learn, to maintain and...