Common Business-Oriented Language
| Paradigm | Procedural, imperative, object-oriented |
|---|---|
| Designed by | Howard Bromberg, Howard Discount, Vernon Reeves, Jean E. Sammet, William Selden, Gertrude Tierney |
| Developers | CODASYL, ANSI, ISO |
| First appeared | 1959 |
| Stable release |
ISO/IEC 1989:2014 / 2014
|
| Typing discipline | Weak, static |
| Filename extensions |
.cbl, .cob, .cpy
|
| Website | cobolstandard |
| Major implementations | |
| GnuCOBOL, IBM COBOL, Micro Focus Visual COBOL | |
| Dialects | |
| ACUCOBOL-GT, COBOL-IT, COBOL/2, DEC COBOL-10, DEC VAX COBOL, DOSVS COBOL, Fujitsu COBOL, Hitachi COBOL2002, HP3000 COBOL/II, IBM COBOL SAA, IBM COBOL/400, IBM COBOL/II, IBM Enterprise COBOL, IBM ILE COBOL, IBM OS/VS COBOL, ICL COBOL, isCOBOL, Micro Focus COBOL, Microsoft COBOL, Realia COBOL, Ryan McFarland RM/COBOL, Ryan McFarland RM/COBOL-85, Tandem (NonStop) COBOL85, Tandem (NonStop) SCOBOL, UNIVAC COBOL, Unisys MCP COBOL74, Unisys MCP COBOL85, Unix COBOL X/Open, Visual COBOL, Wang VS COBOL | |
| Influenced by | |
| AIMACO, C++,COMTRAN, Eiffel,FACT, FLOW-MATIC, Smalltalk | |
| Influenced | |
| CobolScript,PL/I | |
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COBOL (/ˈkoʊbɒl/, an acronym for common business-oriented language) is a compiled English-like computer programming language designed for business use. It is imperative, procedural and, since 2002, object-oriented. COBOL is primarily used in business, finance, and administrative systems for companies and governments. COBOL is still widely used in legacy applications deployed on mainframe computers, such as large-scale batch and transaction processing jobs. But due to its declining popularity and the retirement of experienced COBOL programmers, programs are being migrated to new platforms, rewritten in modern languages or replaced with software packages. Most programming in COBOL is now purely to maintain existing applications.
COBOL was designed in 1959 by CODASYL and was partly based on previous programming language design work by Grace Hopper, commonly referred to as "the (grand)mother of COBOL". It was created as part of a US Department of Defense effort to create a portable programming language for data processing. Intended as a stopgap, the Department of Defense promptly forced computer manufacturers to provide it, resulting in its widespread adoption. It was standardized in 1968 and has since been revised four times. Expansions include support for structured and object-oriented programming. The current standard is ISO/IEC 1989:2014.
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