CODASYL

CODASYL is an acronym for "Conference/Committee on Data Systems Languages". This was a consortium formed in 1959 to guide the development of a standard programming language that could be used on many computers. This effort led to the development of COBOL and other standards.

CODASYL's members were individuals from industry and government involved in data processing activity. Its larger goal was to promote more effective data systems analysis, design, and implementation. The organization published specifications for various languages over the years, handing these over to official standards bodies (ISO, ANSI, or their predecessors) for formal standardization.

CODASYL is remembered almost entirely for two activities: its work on the development of the COBOL language and its activities in standardizing database interfaces. It also worked on a wide range of other topics, including end-user form interfaces and operating system control languages, but these projects had little lasting impact.

The remainder of this section is concerned with CODASYL's database activities.

In 1965 CODASYL formed a List Processing Task Force. This group was chartered to develop COBOL language extensions for processing collections of records; the name arose because Charles Bachman's IDS system (which was the main technical input to the project) managed relationships between records using chains of pointers. In 1967 the group renamed itself the Data Base Task Group (DBTG), and its first report in January 1968 was entitled COBOL extensions to handle data bases.

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