Tutorial Cobol in PDF

A bit of history

To begin, the acronym COBOL stands for: COmmon Business Oriented Language, in other words, a management-oriented language.

For the historical question, I will not reinvent the wheel and I will quote you a small excerpt from our friend at all, Wikipedia:

COBOL was originally created in 1959 by the Short Range Committee, one of three committees proposed for a meeting at the Pentagon in May 1959 organized by Charles Phillips of the United States Department of Defense.

The committee was formed to recommend a short-term approach to a common, vendor-neutral language for US administration management applications.

It consisted of members representing six computer manufacturers and three government agencies. The six computer builders were Burroughs Corporation, IBM, Minneapolis-Honeywell, RCA, Sperry Rand, and Sylvania Electric Products.

The three government agencies were the US Air Force, the David Taylor Model Basin, and the National Standards Institute. This committee was chaired by an NBS member. Mid- and long-term committees have also been proposed to the Pentagon.

Wikipedia

It's old and heavy, but we have to get back to the context of the time, the technical means were not the same. It is still very much used in the tax and business fields, because the cost of maintaining the code is less important than a total overhaul of the IT systems currently in place.

This is not to scare you, but some have had the opportunity to translate the acronym COBOL in a different way: "Compiles Only Because Of Luck" which translates to "Compile only by chance". : p

COBOL: the language of business applications

COBOL is ideally suited to business processing. Business processing includes data collection, validation, updating and reporting. The types of data processed are often numbers and amounts. No other computer language is as well equipped to excel in this type of treatment.
COBOL has been designed to be an easy-to-understand and self-documenting language. It intentionally reflects common English. As a COBOL programmer, I can attest to the fact that almost everyone can watch a section of a COBOL program and see exactly what is going on. I saw people looking over my shoulder while I was reviewing a program and I understood exactly what was happening and why.

Although COBOL is the language of Business, its use has grown over time to include many other areas. Any organization that follows common business practices can take advantage of the strengths of the COBOL language. Governments are an excellent example. They work very well as businesses, and their needs are often met by using COBOL as their primary computer programming language.

Contrary to popular media description, COBOL is far from a dead language. If COBOL is dead, someone forgot to tell computer programs that hold businesses together! COBOL is the dominant computing language for enterprise processing applications. Even in areas where COBOL was once considered inappropriate, it has made tremendous progress. The client / server development relies more and more on COBOL.

Client / server processing has become the watchword of the day. In a nutshell, it is a central server, usually containing a repository of information accessed by clients that connect to that server. Large central systems and COBOL programs have historically implemented these processes. Many companies have tried to replace these systems with client / server processes, only to find the reliability and performance to lock. As a result, large mainframes frequently become the server in client / server processing, with the root business logic written in COBOL remaining intact. COBOL is used today for the client side and server side of client / server processes.

At the base of COBOL is a very simple set of instructions. Like any good game, the roles are simple, but using these roles in combination can make a very fun and challenging adventure.

The first specification for COBOL was developed in 1959 by the Conference on the Language of Data Systems, or CODASYL. His goal was to create a common computer programming language, and COBOL was the result. The language design was strongly influenced by the only business programming language used at the time, FLOW-MATIC. FLOW-MATIC was designed by a very interesting and colorful individual, whose influence on data processing and the use of computers in modern life is often and often underestimated. This person is Admiral Grace Murray Hopper.

The COBOL standard

In 1968, the American National Standards Institute (ANSI), with the aim of eliminating the growing incompatibility between different COBOL compilers, developed a common standard for language. This version was called ANS COBOL. Programs written according to this standard will continue to be compiled 30 years later. Although language today has many more features and improvements, many programs written in the 1960s are still used. In the past year, I have maintained programs that were written in 1972.

The COBOL standard was revised in 1974, adding many new features. This version has been widely accepted and served as a basis for IBM's VS COBOL. In 1985, the language was revised again, improving and enriching the COBOL. Several powerful features have been added to help develop structured programs.

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