Blackwell Reference Online

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COBOL is a procedural programming language designed to address problems in business data processing. The acronym COBOL stands for COmmon Business‐Oriented Language. COBOL has been the most widely used programming language in business. Billions of lines of COBOL are in use throughout the world. COBOL is still an active, standard language but it is not suited to many current processing situations, such as Internet applications. Therefore, other programming languages are receiving greater use in new applications. The effort to develop COBOL was started in the late 1950s by a group of private individuals from academia and industry. This group obtained assistance from the US Department of Defense to set up the Committee on Data Systems Languages (CODASYL). CODASYL was responsible for the first standard of COBOL, called COBOL 60. The US Department of Defense soon adopted COBOL 60 and propagated it as a standard. Other standards of the language have been defined by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI), beginning in 1974 with ANSI‐74 COBOL. The development of COBOL was motivated by business needs that were not well supported by other languages at that time. These needs included efficient retrieval and storage of large data files, manipulation of business financial data, formatting of business data onto reports, and English‐like syntax that could be understood by non‐programmers. ... log in or subscribe to read full text