Introduction to the COBOL Language

Abbreviations: COBOL(Common Business Oriented Language)

Chinese Translation: Cobol Language

Interpretation: a programming language similar to English that is suitable for business and data processing. This language accurately expresses the business data processing process.

COBOL is one of the oldest advanced programming languages and the first commercial language in the world. It is a general business-oriented language, also known as Enterprise Management Language and data processing language.

1. History of COBOL

In May 1959, the Pentagon commissioned Dr. Grace Hopper to lead a committee under the auspices of Rear Admiral Grace Hopper, which was published by the Data System Language Association in 1961. Officially Released in April 1960, known as Cobol-60, now the latest version is Cobol-2002.

In 1963, the National Institute of Standards (ANSI) was standardized, but ANSI standards were rarely followed; therefore, the COBOL program was only partially portable.

2. Importance of COBOL

After more than 40 years of continuous modification, enrichment, and standardization, COBOL has developed into a large variety of languages, it is widely used in data management and business data processing, such as accounting, statistical reports, planning, information retrieval, and personnel management.

The importance of COBOL can be described in this sentence: 70% of the world's data is processed in the COBOL language, and 90% of the ATM transaction processing uses the COBOL language. There are 30 billion COBOL transactions processed online every day. Among the top 500, 492 (including all the top 100) use the COBOL language. Currently, the investment in COBOL has exceeded 3 trillion US dollars. It is said that there are more than 100 billion lines of programs written in Cobol, in addition, the number of lines of code is growing at an annual rate of about 5 billion.

Due to the strong foundation of COBOL in the business field, it is mainly used in banking, financial and accounting industries and other very important commercial data processing fields. Therefore, even for IT companies with considerable experience, re-writing reliable application software in the COBOL language is neither practical nor commercial, and takes a long time, as long as the mainframe exists, COBOL will not disappear. Even the "Millennium worm" (Y2K), which has a huge impact on the computer industry, has not changed the fate of Cobol.

3. Features of COBOL

COBOL is a file-oriented, process-oriented High-level programming language (POL) for data processing. It is a powerful and extremely lengthy language.

COBOL is suitable for environments with a cyclic processing cycle (for example, wage check printing) and a large amount of data manipulation. COBOL is mainly used in the field of commercial data processing. It collects, stores, transfers, classifies, sorts, computes and prints reports and outputs images for various types of data.

The COBOL syntax is very similar to English, so that even people who do not know the computer can understand the program.

Powerful file processing functions. A large amount of data is usually stored on disks as files.

It only provides five simple arithmetic operations: addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, and multiplication. Therefore, it is not suitable for scientific calculation.

In the future, COBOL will support new web technologies such as XML.

4. program structure of COBOL

The COBOL program consists of four parts: Identification Division. (identification part), Environment Division. (Ministry of Environment), Data Division. (Data Department), procedure division. (process), and each part is composed of several sections.