COBOL

By Rhonda Wright

COBOL

Common Business Oriented Language

Outline of Presentation

History Strengths and Weaknesses Facts Evaluation

History of COBOL

Developed by the CODASYL Committee

Business applications Coding Forms

COBOL Design

Punched onto punch cards

loaded into the computer using punch card reader

Strengths of COBOL

COBOL is in wide use English-like and self-documenting promotes code writing discipline inherently modular machine independent standardized regularly updated.

Weaknesses of COBOL

wordy limited hard to learn slow

COBOL Facts 75% of the world's business data is in COBOL. -

Gartner Group There are between 180 billion and 200 billion lines of COBOL code in use worldwide. - Gartner

Group 15% of all new applications (5 billion lines) through 2005 will be in COBOL. - Gartner Group

CICS transaction volume (such as COBOL-based ATM transactions) grew from 20 billion per day

in 1998 to 30 billion per day in 2002. - The Cobol Report

Facts continued

Replacement costs for COBOL systems, estimated at $25 per line, are in the hundreds of billions of dollars. - Tactical Strategy Group

There are 90,000 COBOL programmers in North America in 2002. Over the next four years there will be a 13% decrease in their number due to retirement and death. - Gartner Group

There are at least 10,000 "Free Agent" COBOL programmers in the US today. - The Senior Staff

Facts Continued

The most highly paid programmers in the next ten years are going to be COBOL programmers. - GIGA Group

Any programmer with above average skills in COBOL can quickly learn the basics of Web Enabling, at home, through self-training. - Bill Lockhart, Legacy Reservist

COBOL programmers could be the key to new IT. The legions of COBOL programmers who helped organizations get legacy applications ready for Y2K could find new work bringing those applications into the Internet age. - IEEE Computer, April 2000

COBOL Evaluation

Good for a first programming language Big impact on other languages

– widely used today– simple and understandable– dominant programming language in the

business computing domain

References

Www.csis.ul.ie/COBOL/Course/COBOLIntro.htm

http://www.cobolwebler.com/cobolfacts.htm

Cobol in an Open Source Future http://cobolreport.com/columnists/tw/part2.asp