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COBOL
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

(Redirected from Cobol) COBOL /kobl/ is one of the oldest programming languages, primarily designed by Grace Hopper. Its name is an acronym for COmmon Business-Oriented Language, defining its primary domain in business, finance, and administrative systems for companies and governments. The COBOL 2002 standard includes support for objectoriented programming and other modern language features.[1]

COBOL
Paradigm(s) Appeared in Designed by procedural, imperative, objectoriented 1959 Grace Hopper, William Selden, Gertrude Tierney, Howard Bromberg, Howard Discount, Vernon Reeves, Jean E. Sammet

Contents
1 History and specification 1.1 ANS COBOL 1968 1.2 COBOL 1974 1.3 COBOL 1985 1.4 COBOL 2002 and object-oriented COBOL 1.5 History of COBOL standards 1.6 Legacy 2 Features 2.1 Self-modifying code 2.2 Syntactic features 2.3 Data types 2.4 Hello, world 2.4.1 Hello, OS/360 circa 1972 3 Criticism and defense 3.1 Lack of structurability 3.2 Compatibility issues after standardization 3.3 Verbose syntax 3.4 Alienation from the computer science community 3.5 Other defenses 4 See also 5 References 6 Sources

Stable release

COBOL 2002 (2002)

Typing discipline strong, static Major GNU Cobol, Micro Focus implementations International (e.g. the Eclipseplug-in Micro Focus Net Express) Dialects HP3000 COBOL/II, COBOL/2, IBM OS/VS COBOL, IBM COBOL/II, IBM COBOL SAA, IBM Enterprise COBOL, IBM COBOL/400, IBM ILE COBOL, Unix COBOL X/Open, Micro Focus COBOL, Microsoft COBOL, Ryan McFarland RM/COBOL, Ryan McFarland RM/COBOL-85, DOSVS COBOL, UNIVAC COBOL, Realia COBOL, Fujitsu COBOL, ICL COBOL, ACUCOBOL-GT, isCOBOL, COBOL-IT, DEC COBOL-10, DEC VAX COBOL, Wang VS COBOL, Visual COBOL, Tandem (NonStop) COBOL85, Tandem (NonStop) SCOBOL (a COBOL74 variant

History and specification

The COBOL specification was created by a committee of researchers from private industry, universities, and government during the second half of 1959. The specifications were to a great extent inspired by the FLOW-MATIC language invented by Grace Hopper,
Influenced by

for creating screens on text-based terminals) FLOW-MATIC, COMTRAN, FACT Influenced PL/I, CobolScript, ABAP

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commonly referred to as "the mother of the COBOL COBOL at Wikibooks language." The IBM COMTRAN language invented by Bob Bemer was also drawn upon, but the FACT language specification from Honeywell was not distributed to committee members until late in the process and had relatively little impact. FLOW-MATIC's status as the only language of the bunch to have actually been implemented made it particularly attractive to the committee.[2] The scene was set on April 8, 1959 at a Conference on Data Systems Languages (CODASYL) for computer manufacturers, users, and university people, at the University of Pennsylvania Computing Center. The United States Department of Defense subsequently agreed to sponsor and oversee the next activities. A meeting chaired by Charles A. Phillips was held at the Pentagon on May 28 and 29 of 1959 (exactly one year after the Zrich ALGOL 58 meeting); there it was decided to set up three committees: short, intermediate and long range (the last one was never actually formed). It was the Short Range Committee, chaired by Joseph Wegstein of the US National Bureau of Standards, that during the following months created a description of the first version of COBOL.[3] The committee was formed to recommend a short range approach to a common business language. The committee was made up of members representing six computer manufacturers and three government agencies. The six computer manufacturers were Burroughs Corporation, IBM, Minneapolis-Honeywell (Honeywell Labs), RCA, Sperry Rand, and Sylvania Electric Products. The three government agencies were the US Air Force, the Navy's David Taylor Model Basin, and the National Bureau of Standards (now National Institute of Standards and Technology). The intermediate-range committee was formed but never became operational. In the end a sub-committee of the Short Range Committee developed the specifications of the COBOL language. This sub-committee was made up of six individuals: William Selden and Gertrude Tierney of IBM Howard Bromberg and Howard Discount of RCA Vernon Reeves and Jean E. Sammet of Sylvania Electric Products[4] The decision to use the name "COBOL" was made at a meeting of the committee held on 18 September 1959. The subcommittee completed the specifications for COBOL in December 1959. The first compilers for COBOL were subsequently implemented in 1960, and on December 6 and 7, essentially the same COBOL program ran on two different computer makes, an RCA computer and a Remington-Rand Univac computer, demonstrating that compatibility could be achieved.

ANS COBOL 1968

After 1959 COBOL underwent several modifications and improvements. In an attempt to overcome the problem of incompatibility between different versions of COBOL, the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) developed a standard form of the language in 1968 after the version COBOL-61 release which has become the cornerstone for further versions. This version was known as American National Standard (ANS) COBOL.

COBOL 1974
In 1974, ANSI published a revised version of (ANS) COBOL, containing new features such as file organizations, the report writer module and the segmentation module.[5] Several features were deleted from the standard, notably the NOTE statement, the EXAMINE statement (which was replaced by INSPECT) and the implementerdefined random access module (which was superseded by the new sequential and relative I-O modules). These made up 44 changes which rendered existing statements incompatible with the new standard.[6]

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COBOL 1985
In 1985, ANSI published another revised version that included many new features not in the 1974 standard, notably including:[7] scope terminators (END-IF, END-PERFORM, END-READ, etc.) nested subprograms the CONTINUE statement the EVALUATE statement the INITIALIZE statement reference modification the >= and <= operators

COBOL 2002 and object-oriented COBOL

The language continues to evolve today. In the early 1990s it was decided to add object-orientation in the next full revision of COBOL. The initial estimate was to have this revision completed by 1997 and an ISO CD (Committee Draft) was available by 1997. Some vendors (including Micro Focus, Fujitsu, Veryant, and IBM) introduced object-oriented syntax based on the 1997 or other drafts of the full revision. The final approved ISO standard (adopted as an ANSI standard by INCITS) was approved and made available in 2002. Like the C++ and Java programming languages, object-oriented COBOL compilers are available even as the language moves toward standardization. Fujitsu/GTSoftware,[8] Micro Focus and RainCode currently support object-oriented COBOL compilers targeting the .NET Framework. COBOL 2002 included many other features beyond object-orientation. These included (but are not limited to): National language support (including but not limited to Unicode support) Locale-based processing User-defined functions CALL (and function) prototypes (for compile-time parameter checking) Pointers and syntax for getting and freeing storage Calling conventions to and from non-COBOL languages such as C Support for execution within framework environments such as Microsoft's .NET and Java (including COBOL instantiated as Enterprise JavaBeans) Bit and Boolean support "True" binary support (up until this enhancement, binary items were truncated based on the (base-10) specification within the Data Division) Floating-point support Standard (or portable) arithmetic results

History of COBOL standards

The specifications approved by the full Short Range Committee were approved by the Executive Committee on January 3, 1960, and sent to the government printing office, which edited and printed these specifications as COBOL 60. The American National Standards Institute (ANSI) produced several revisions of the COBOL standard, including:

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COBOL-68 COBOL-74 COBOL-85 Intrinsic Functions Amendment - 1989 Corrections Amendment - 1991 After the Amendments to the 1985 ANSI Standard (which were adopted by ISO), primary development and ownership was taken over by ISO. The following editions and TRs (Technical Reports) have been issued by ISO (and adopted as ANSI) Standards: COBOL 2002 Finalizer Technical Report - 2003 Native XML syntax Technical Report - 2006 Object Oriented Collection Class Libraries - pending final approval... From 2002, the ISO standard is also available to the public coded as ISO/IEC 1989. Work progresses on the next full revision of the COBOL Standard. Approval and availability was expected early 2010s. For information on this revision, to see the latest draft of this revision, or to see other work on the COBOL Standard, see the COBOL Standards Website (http://www.cobolstandard.info).

Legacy
COBOL programs are in use globally in governmental and military agencies and in commercial enterprises, and are running on operating systems such as IBM's z/OS and z/VSE, the POSIX families (Unix/Linux etc.), and Microsoft's Windows as well as ICL's VME operating system and Unisys' OS 2200. In 1997, the Gartner Group reported that 80% of the world's business ran on COBOL with over 200 billion lines of code in existence and with an estimated 5 billion lines of new code annually.[9] Near the end of the twentieth century the year 2000 problem was the focus of significant COBOL programming effort, sometimes by the same programmers who had designed the systems decades before. The particular level of effort required for COBOL code has been attributed both to the large amount of business-oriented COBOL, as COBOL is by design a business language and business applications use dates heavily, and to constructs of the COBOL language such as the PICTURE clause, which can be used to define fixed-length numeric fields, including two-digit fields for years.[citation needed] Because of the clean-up effort put into these COBOL programs for Y2K, many of them have been kept in use for years since then.[10]

Features
COBOL as defined in the original specification included a PICTURE clause for detailed field specification. It did not support local variables, recursion, dynamic memory allocation, or structured programming constructs. Support for some or all of these features has been added in later editions of the COBOL standard. COBOL has many reserved words (over 400), called keywords.

Self-modifying code
The original COBOL specification supported the infamous "ALTER X TO PROCEED TO Y" statement, for which many compilers generated self-modifying code. X and Y are paragraph labels, and any "GO TO X" statements executed after such an ALTER statement have the meaning "GO TO Y" instead. Many compilers still support

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it,[11] but it was deemed obsolete in the COBOL 1985 standard[12] and should not be used in new programs. The use of ALTER has been banned altogether for some time by many software companies as part of their programming practices.

Syntactic features
COBOL provides an update-in-place syntax, for example

ADD YEARS TO AGE

The equivalent construct in many procedural languages would be

age = age + years

This syntax is similar to the compound assignment operator later adopted by C:

age += years

The abbreviated conditional expression

IF SALARY > 9000 OR SUPERVISOR-SALARY OR = PREV-SALARY

is equivalent to

IF SALARY > 9000 OR SALARY > SUPERVISOR-SALARY OR SALARY = PREV-SALARY

COBOL provides "named conditions" (so-called 88-levels). These are declared as sub-items of another item (the conditional variable). The named condition can be used in an IF statement, and tests whether the conditional variable is equal to any of the values given in the named condition's VALUE clause. The SET statement can be used to make a named condition TRUE (by assigning the first of its values to the conditional variable). COBOL allows identifiers up to 30 characters long. When COBOL was introduced, much shorter lengths (e.g., 6 characters for Fortran) were prevalent. COBOL introduced the concept of copybooks chunks of code that can be inserted into a larger program.

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COBOL does this with the COPY statement, which also allows other code to replace parts of the copybook's code with other code (using the REPLACING ... BY ... clause).

Data types
Standard COBOL provides the following data types: Data type Character Edited character Sample declaration
PIC X(20) PIC A(4)9(5)X(7) PIC X99BAXX

Notes Alphanumeric and alphabetic-only Single-byte character set (SBCS) Formatted and inserted characters Binary 16, 32, or 64 bits (2, 4, or 8 bytes) Signed or unsigned. Conforming compilers limit the maximum value of variables based on the PICTURE clause and not the number of bits reserved for storage. 1 to 18 decimal digits (1 to 10 bytes) Signed or unsigned 1 to 18 decimal digits (1 to 18 bytes) Signed or unsigned Leading or trailing sign, overpunch or separate Binary floating-point Formatted characters and digits

Numeric fixed-point binary

PIC S999V99 [USAGE] COMPUTATIONAL

or
BINARY

Numeric fixed-point packed PIC S999V99 decimal PACKED-DECIMAL Numeric fixed-point zoned decimal Numeric floating-point Edited numeric
PIC S999V99 [USAGE DISPLAY]

PIC S9V999ES99 PIC +Z,ZZ9.99 PIC $***,**9.99CR 01 CUST-NAME. 05 CUST-LAST PIC X(20). 05 CUST-FIRST PIC X(20). OCCURS 12 TIMES OCCURS 0 to 12 TIMES DEPENDING ON CUST-COUNT 66 RAW-RECORD RENAMES CUST-RECORD 88 IS-RETIRED-AGE VALUES 65 THRU 150

Group (record)

Aggregated elements

Table (array) Variable-length table Renames (variant or union data) Condition name Array index

Fixed-size array, row-major order Up to 7 dimensions Variable-sized array, row-major order Up to 7 dimensions Character data overlaying other variables Boolean value dependent upon another variable Index (subscript) of a table element May be associated with a specific table using INDEXED BY

[USAGE] INDEX

Most vendors provide additional types, such as:

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Data type Numeric floating-point single precision Numeric floating-point double precision

Sample declaration
PIC S9V9999999ES99 [USAGE] COMPUTATIONAL-1

Notes Binary floating-point (32 bits, 7+ digits) (IBM extension) Binary floating-point (64 bits, 16+ digits) (IBM extension)

PIC S9V999ES99 [USAGE] COMPUTATIONAL-2

Numeric fixed-point packed PIC S9V999 Same as PACKED DECIMAL [USAGE] COMPUTATIONAL-3 (IBM extension) decimal Numeric fixed-point binary
PIC S999V99 [USAGE] COMPUTATIONAL-4

Same as COMPUTATIONAL or BINARY (IBM extension)

Numeric fixed-point binary (native binary)

Binary 16, 32, or 64 bits (2, 4, or 8 bytes) Signed or unsigned. The maximum PIC S999V99 value of variables based on the number [USAGE] COMPUTATIONAL-5 of bits reserved for storage and not on the PICTURE clause. (IBM extension)
PIC S999V99 [USAGE] COMPUTATIONAL-4

Numeric fixed-point binary in native byte order Numeric fixed-point binary in big-endian byte order Wide character Edited wide character Edited floating-point Data pointer Code pointer Bit field

Binary 16, 32, or 64 bits (2, 4, or 8 bytes) Signed or unsigned Binary 16, 32, or 64 bits (2, 4, or 8 bytes) Signed or unsigned Alphanumeric Double-byte character set (DBCS) Formatted and inserted wide characters Formatted characters, decimal digits, and exponent Data memory address Code memory address n can be from 1 to 64, defining an n-bit integer Signed or unsigned

PIC S999V99 [USAGE] COMPUTATIONAL-5

PIC G(20)

PIC G99BGGG

PIC +9.9(6)E+99 [USAGE] POINTER [USAGE] PROCEDUREPOINTER PIC 1(n) [USAGE] COMPUTATIONAL-5

Hello, world
An example of the "Hello, world" program in COBOL:

IDENTIFICATION DIVISION. PROGRAM-ID. HELLO-WORLD. PROCEDURE DIVISION.

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DISPLAY 'Hello, world'. STOP RUN.

Hello, OS/360 circa 1972 On an IBM System/360 running OS/360 MVT 21.8f, circa 1972 (which predates the tradition of using Hello, world for introductory examples), Hello, world would have been punched onto 80-column cards, containing source code similar to:

//COBUCLG JOB CLASS=A,MSGCLASS=A,MSGLEVEL=(1,1) //HELOWRLD EXEC COBUCLG,PARM.COB='MAP,LIST,LET' //COB.SYSIN DD * 001 IDENTIFICATION DIVISION. 002 PROGRAM-ID. 'HELLO'. 003 ENVIRONMENT DIVISION. 004 CONFIGURATION SECTION. 005 SOURCE-COMPUTER. IBM-360. 006 OBJECT-COMPUTER. IBM-360. 0065 SPECIAL-NAMES. 0066 CONSOLE IS CNSL. 007 DATA DIVISION. 008 WORKING-STORAGE SECTION. 009 77 HELLO-CONST PIC X(12) VALUE 'HELLO, WORLD'. 075 PROCEDURE DIVISION. 090 000-DISPLAY. 100 DISPLAY HELLO-CONST UPON CNSL. 110 STOP RUN. //LKED.SYSLIB DD DSNAME=SYS1.COBLIB,DISP=SHR // DD DSNAME=SYS1.LINKLIB,DISP=SHR //GO.SYSPRINT DD SYSOUT=A //

The "//" source lines are JCL statements, surrounding the COBOL sequence-numbered source code. The ANS COBOL Compile, Link, and Go module "COBUCLG" was typically utilized to compile and execute the code. The resulting "HELLO, WORLD" output would have then been displayed on the operator's console.

Criticism and defense

Lack of structurability
In his letter to an editor in 1975 entitled "How do we tell truths that might hurt?" which was critical of several programming languages contemporaneous with COBOL, computer scientist and Turing Award recipient Edsger Dijkstra remarked that "The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offense."[13] In his dissenting response to Dijkstra's article and the above "offensive statement," computer scientist Howard E. Tompkins defended structured COBOL: "COBOL programs with convoluted control flow indeed tend to 'cripple the mind'," but this was because "There are too many such business application programs written by programmers that have never had the benefit of structured COBOL taught well..."[14] COBOL notably lacked any facility for defining independent procedures/functions until COBOL-74. This complicated development because it meant that all variables were global and could be modified anywhere
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within the program. However, its varied control structures, reduced the need for GO TOs, with the PERFORM statement allowing programmers to easily access powerful looping facilities.[15]:349350 Additionally, the introduction of OO-COBOL has added support for object-oriented code as well as user-defined functions and user-defined data types to COBOL's repertoire.

Compatibility issues after standardization

COBOL-85 was not fully compatible with earlier versions, resulting in the "caesarean birth" of COBOL-85. Joseph T. Brophy, the CIO of Travelers Insurance, spearheaded an effort to inform users of COBOL of the heavy reprogramming costs of implementing the new standard. As a result the ANSI COBOL Committee received more than 3,200 letters from the public, mostly negative, requiring the committee to make changes. On the other hand, conversion to COBOL-85 was thought to increase productivity in future years, thus justifying the conversion costs.[16]

Verbose syntax
COBOL syntax has often been criticized for its verbosity. However, proponents note that this was intentional in the language design, and many consider it one of COBOL's strengths. One of the design goals of COBOL was that non-programmersmanagers, supervisors, and userscould read and understand the code.[15]:350 This is why COBOL has an English-like syntax and structural elementsincluding: nouns, verbs, clauses, sentences, sections, and divisions. Consequently, COBOL is considered by at least one source to be "The most readable, understandable and self-documenting programming language in use today. [...] Not only does this readability generally assist the maintenance process but the older a program gets the more valuable this readability becomes."[17] On the other hand, the mere ability to read and understand a few lines of COBOL code does not grant to an executive or end user the experience and knowledge needed to design, build, and maintain large software systems.

Alienation from the computer science community

The COBOL community has always been isolated from the computer science community. No academic computer scientists participated in the design of COBOL, with all of those on the committee from a commercial background or from government. This was due to the differing interests of computer scientists at the time who were more interested in fields like numerical analysis, physics and system programming instead of the commercial file-processing problems COBOL development tackled. The COBOL specification did not use the new Backus-Naur form, resulting in severe criticism at the time. COBOL also suffered from a shortage of material covering it, with introductory books taking until 1963 to appear. By 1985, there were twice as many books on Fortran and four times as many books on BASIC than on COBOL in the Library of Congress.
[15]:348349

Later, as COBOL became a mainstream language, COBOL suffered as university professors taught more modern, state-of-the-art languages and techniques instead of COBOL which was said to have a "trade school" nature.[15]:351

Other defenses
Traditional COBOL is a simple language with a limited scope of function (with no pointers, no user-defined types, and no user-defined functions), encouraging a straightforward coding style. This has made it well-suited

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to its primary domain of business computingwhere the program complexity lies in the business rules that need to be encoded rather than sophisticated algorithms or data structures. Because the standard does not belong to any particular vendor, programs written in COBOL are highly portable. The language can be used on a wide variety of hardware platforms and operating systems. Additionally, the rigid hierarchical structure restricts the definition of external references to the Environment Division, which simplifies platform changes in particular.[17]

See also
Programming language genealogies Alphabetical list of programming languages Comparison of programming languages GNU Cobol CODASYL

References
1. ^ Oliveira, Rui (2006). The Power of Cobol. City: BookSurge Publishing. ISBN 0-620-34652-3. 2. ^ Sammet, Jean (1978). "The Early History of COBOL" (http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1198367). ACM SIGPLAN Notices (Association for Computing Machinery, Inc.) 13 (8): 121161. doi:10.1145/960118.808378 (http://dx.doi.org/10.1145%2F960118.808378). Retrieved 14 January 2010. 3. ^ Garfunkel, Jerome (1987). The Cobol 85 Example Book. New York: Wiley. ISBN 0-471-80461-4. 4. ^ Wexelblat, Richard (1981). History of Programming Languages. Boston: Academic Press. ISBN 0-12-745040-8. 5. ^ Klein, William M. (4 October 2010). "American National Standard COBOL 1974" (http://home.comcast.net /~wmklein/DOX/History.pdf). The History of COBOL. p. 16. Archived (https://web.archive.org /web/20140107192608/http://home.comcast.net/~wmklein/DOX/History.pdf) from the original on 7 January 2013. Retrieved 7 January 2014. 6. ^ Baird, George N.; Oliver, Paul (May 1977). "1974 Standard (X3.231974)" (http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext /u2/a039740.pdf). Programming Language Standards Who Needs Them?. pp. 1921. Archived (https://web.archive.org/web/20140107192439/http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a039740.pdf) from the original on 7 January 2014. Retrieved 7 January 2014. 7. ^ Roy, M K; Dastidar, D Ghost (1 June 1989). "Features of COBOL - 85" (http://books.google.com /?id=N066w1XgJXcC&pg=PA438&lpg=PA438&dq=cobol+1985+changes#v=onepage& q=cobol%201985%20changes&f=false). COBOL Programming: Problems and Solutions (2nd ed.). McGraw-Hill Education. pp. 438451. ISBN 978-0074603185. 8. ^ "NetCOBOL for .Net" (http://www.netcobol.com/product/netcobol-for-net/). netcobol.com. GTSoftware. 2013. Retrieved 29 January 2014. 9. ^ Kizior, Ronald J.; Carr, Donald; Halpern, Paul. "Does COBOL Have a Future?" (http://proc.isecon.org/2000/126 /ISECON.2000.Kizior.pdf). The Proceedings of the Information Systems Education Conference 2000 17 (126). Retrieved 2012-09-30. 10. ^ Carr, Donald; Kizior, Ronald J. (13 June 2003). "Continued Relevance of COBOL in Business and Academia: Current Situation and Comparison to the Year 2000 Study" (http://www.microfocus.com/000/WP20030613_tcm21-2774.pdf) (PDF). p. 16. Retrieved 5 January 2014. "Large investment in these [COBOL] applications along with major reinvestment that occurred to solve the Y2K problem and the need to recapture investment in these systems will necessitate continued future demand [for COBOL skills] over the next 10 years." 11. ^ Examples of compiler support can be seen in the following: Tiffin, Brian. September 2013 (https://sourceforge.net/p/open-cobol/discussion/109661/thread/7dc2941f/). "State of the Project". GNU Cobol. Retrieved 5 January 2014. "The ALTER Statement" (http://documentation.microfocus.com/help/topic /com.microfocus.eclipse.infocenter.visualcobol.vs2013/HRLHLHPDF803.html). Micro Focus Visual COBOL 2.2 for Visual Studio 2013 COBOL Language Reference. Micro Focus. Retrieved 5 January 2014.

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12.

13.

14. 15.

16. 17.

"ALTER Statement (Nucleus)" (http://www.csim.scu.edu.tw/~kuo/COBOL/COBOLCompiler/COBOL %E6%89%8B%E5%86%8A/cob_lrf.pdf) (PDF). COBOL85 Reference Manual. Fujitsu. November 1996. p. 555. Retrieved 5 January 2014. "ALTER Statement" (http://pic.dhe.ibm.com/infocenter/pdthelp/v1r1/topic/com.ibm.entcobol.doc_5.1 /PGandLR/ref/rlpsalte.html). Enterprise COBOL for z/OS Language Reference. IBM. June 2013. Retrieved 5 January 2014. ^ "The ALTER Statement" (http://documentation.microfocus.com /help/index.jsp?topic=%2Fcom.microfocus.eclipse.infocenter.visualcobol.vs2013%2FHRLHLHPDF803.html). Micro Focus Visual COBOL 2.2 for Visual Studio 2013 COBOL Language Reference. Micro Focus. Retrieved 28 December 2013. "The ALTER statement is classed as an obsolete element in the ANSI'85 standard and is scheduled to be deleted from the next full revision of the ANSI Standard." ^ Dijkstra (2006). "E. W. Dijkstra Archive: How do we tell truths that might hurt? (EWD498)" (http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD04xx/EWD498.html). University of Texas at Austin. Retrieved August 29, 2007. ^ Tompkins, H. E. (1983). "In defense of teaching structured COBOL as computer science". ACM SIGPLAN Notices 18 (4): 86. doi:10.1145/948176.948186 (http://dx.doi.org/10.1145%2F948176.948186). ^ a b c d Shneiderman, B. (October 1985). "The Relationship Between COBOL and Computer Science". Annals of the History of Computing (IEEE) 7 (4): 348352. doi:10.1109/MAHC.1985.10041 (http://dx.doi.org /10.1109%2FMAHC.1985.10041). ^ Garfunkel, Jerome (1987). The COBOL 85 example book. New York: Wiley. ISBN 0-471-80461-4. ^ a b Coughlan, Michael (2002). "Introduction to COBOL" (http://www.csis.ul.ie/cobol/course /COBOLIntro.htm#part1). Retrieved 3 February 2014.

Sources
Ebbinkhuijsen, Wim B.C., COBOL Alphen aan den Rijn/Diegem: Samson Bedrijfsinformatie bv, 1990. ISBN 90-14-04560-3. (Dutch) Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=COBOL&oldid=593940794" Categories: COBOL Object-oriented programming languages .NET programming languages Programming languages created in the 1950s Programming languages with an ISO standard This page was last modified on 4 February 2014 at 20:35. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License; additional terms may apply. By using this site, you agree to the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. Wikipedia is a registered trademark of the Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., a non-profit organization.

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