COBOL

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COBOL (COmmon Business Oriented Language) is a programming language for industrial and government agencies. In the early 60s. the COBOL language was widely used to process business information on computers.

History

The architecture of the COBOL language has been repeatedly revised - its first version was released in 1960, and later versions in 1974 and 1984. The development of the COBOL language under the leadership of Grace Hopper was organized by the US Department of Defense. The developers of the COBOL language borrowed some ideas from the FLOWMATIC language created by Univac, including the use of nouns and verbs to describe actions and the separation of data descriptions from commands. When developing the COBOL language, a unique goal was set - to create a programming language that uses "natural English" to describe algorithms. Although the resulting language is easy enough to read, it still has formal syntax and programming on it requires certain practical skills. Due to the large number of views of various data and the huge number of options for most language operators, the translation of a COBOL program into effective executable code is quite complex. Most early COBOL compilers were extremely slow, but later improvements in compilation methods led to relatively fast COBOL compilers creating fairly efficient executable code.

2023: Tool released to convert ancient Cobol code to Java

On August 22, 2023, IBM announced the Watsonx Code Assistant for Z^[1] artificial] intelligence tool for automated translation of code from the ancient Cobol programming language into Java. Read more here.

Structure

COBOL programs are organized in four sections. Such an organization meets two main goals of language development: the separation of machine-dependent program elements from machine-independent ones, as well as the separation of the description of data from the description of the algorithm. As a result, three sections of the program appeared:

• PROCEDURE division contains algorithms
• The DATA division contains descriptions of the data
• The ENVIRONMENT division contains machine-dependent software specifications, such as links between the program and external data files.
• The fourth identification section (IDENTIFICATION division) contains the name of the program and the name of its author, as well as additional information and documentation.

The COBOL language structure is based on a static runtime structure. There is no need to organize memory resource management during program execution, and many aspects of the language have been designed to allow for relatively efficient runtime structures (although these goals are not as important as hardware independence and program portability). Most programs are easy to read, since this language uses syntax similar to that of English. To improve the readability of the program, you can use numerous optional, so-called noise, words. The COBOL language syntax provides easy program readability, but makes writing difficult because even the simplest program is quite long.

A version of the Cobol development language platform for creating composite applications that do not need to be ported when used under Linux, Unix, in the Azure cloud and running on a Java virtual machine

Micro Focus updated the Cobol programming language developer platform in January 2011, adding the ability to launch Cobol applications on the Microsoft Azure cloud service . The release of Visual Cobol R3, released on Thursday, also offers preview capabilities for Cobol programs running on JVM (Java Virtual Machine), said Peter Anderton, head of Micro Focus.

In this release, the company has done a great job of aligning legacy language constructs with modern computing environments. According to Anderton, in its current presentation, Cobol can even become an effective choice in new projects. Using Visual Cobol, a developer can create an application once and run it, without additional adjustments, on Unix or Linux, on JVM or on the Azure service platform, on the Microsoft NET 4.0 platform.

The previous version of Visual Cobol served as a plugin for Microsoft Visual Studio 2010, allowing Visual Studio users to write program texts in Cobol. Version 3 can also be used as a plugin for Eclipse IDE (Integrated Development Environment), in addition to Visual Studio.

In the process of creating applications on the Azure platform, Visual Cobol uses Visual Studio 2010 mechanisms to host programs in the Azure cloud. This is the first version of Visual Cobol to provide such an opportunity, Anderton said.

Linux and Unix users Visual Cobol R3 offers what is called the Development Hub, which allows you to write code on the desktop, and compile and debug on a remote computer.

This technical release for JVM is a trial launch pending a full product - Visual Cobol R4, which is expected to be ready in May. Micro Focus developed a compiler for the language that translates Cobol code into Java bytecode, which ensures its performance on any JVM platform.

"The technology already exists, but its convenience is not 100 per cent assured," Anderton said. However, this release will allow developers to start working with JVM while waiting for R4. You can already use Cobol along with Java. The interaction between them has become much easier. You can create composite applications that use the most appropriate language for each part of your work.

In this release, the Cobol framework is expanded with a number of additional, C# and Java-like calls, in the hope that these constructs will facilitate Java and C# programmers to use the language.

Created in 1959, Cobol was designed to simplify the process of writing programs using a syntax more understandable to non-programmers. A significant amount of Cobol code still works today. The company estimates that 220 billion lines of code in this language currently operate on mainframes and other systems. Cobol provides computational accuracy that is still difficult to achieve in other languages. For example, it can perform mathematical operations up to 38 decimal places, truncated.

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