Cobol
Legacy business language still running critical banking, payroll, and mainframe systems.
Overview
COBOL (Common Business-Oriented Language) is a compiled, English-like programming language designed for business use. Created in 1959 by CODASYL with support from the U.S. Department of Defense, it was developed to provide a portable, machine-independent language for data processing across different hardware platforms.
The language uses prose-like syntax (e.g., `MOVE x TO y`) intended to be self-documenting and highly readable. COBOL is primarily used in business, finance, and administrative systems, and remains widely deployed on mainframe computers for large-scale batch and transaction processing. While most modern COBOL development focuses on maintaining existing applications, the language has evolved through multiple standards, most recently ISO/IEC 1989:2023, adding support for structured and object-oriented programming.
Key features
- English-like prose syntax
- Rigid division-based structure
- Support for batch and transaction processing
- Object-oriented programming support
- Highly readable self-documenting code
- Highly readable local syntax
- Excellent portability across mainframes
- Strong historical support for business data processing
- Extremely verbose syntax
- Lacks a large standard library
- Often results in hard-to-comprehend monolithic programs
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