SIZE The proposed standard (commonly called COBOL-80) differed significantly from the previous one, causing concerns about incompatibility and conversion costs. The CODASYL Executive Committee later created the COBOL Maintenance Committee to answer questions from users and vendors and to improve and expand the specifications. [30], The short-range committee was made up of members representing six computer manufacturers and three government agencies. The initial estimate was to have this revision completed by 1997, and an ISO Committee Draft (CD) was available by 1997. Literals include numerals (e.g. Data stored in the form of 0s and 1s, as a binary number. By mid-1964, they had increased to 111000 statements per minute.
For years, COBOL has been assumed as a programming language for business operations in mainframes,[14] although in recent years an increasing interest has surged on migrating COBOL operations to cloud computing. A 1962 US Navy evaluation found compilation speeds of 311 statements per minute. Execution goes down through the procedures of a program until it is terminated. Records in a file are terminated by a newline and may be of varying length.[130]. PERFORM also differs from conventional procedure calls in that there is, at least traditionally, no notion of a call stack. The data division is used to declare variables and parameters. Some picture characters specify the type of the item and how many characters or digits it occupies in memory. Suggestions included "BUSY" (Business System), "INFOSYL" (Information System Language) and "COCOSYL" (Common Computer Systems Language). | The group took primary ownership and development of the COBOL standard, where ANSI did most of the proposals. There are two ways of calling a method: the INVOKE statement, which acts similarly to CALL, or through inline method invocation, which is analogous to using functions. Specifically influenced COBOL 2002's object-oriented features. 
In traditional COBOL implementations, this is not the case. They agreed unanimously that more people should be able to program and that the new language should not be restricted by the limitations of contemporary technology. [187] Ten years later, a poll by Micro Focus found that 20% of university academics thought COBOL was outdated or dead and that 55% believed their students thought COBOL was outdated or dead.
After three years, ISO changed the status of the group to a formal Working Group: WG 4 COBOL. Explicit file structure definitions preceded the development of database management systems and aggregated data was a significant advance over Fortran's arrays. Unlike other languages, uncaught exceptions may not terminate the program and the program can proceed unaffected. as currency signs, locales and character sets. Computer scientists at the time were more interested in fields like numerical analysis, physics and system programming than the commercial file-processing problems which COBOL development tackled. Hopper is sometimes referred to as "the mother of COBOL" or "the grandmother of COBOL",[37][38][39] although Jean Sammet, a lead designer of COBOL, stated that Hopper "was not the mother, creator or developer of Cobol". [45] 
Despite being technically superior, FACT had not been created with portability in mind or through manufacturer and user consensus. A majority agreed that the language should make maximal use of English, be capable of change, be machine-independent and be easy to use, even at the expense of power.
FLOW-MATIC's inventor, Grace Hopper, also served as a technical adviser to the committee. [169] As a result, the ANSI COBOL Committee received more than 2,200 letters from the public, mostly negative, requiring the committee to make changes. [10][113] 36% of managers said they planned to migrate from COBOL, and 25% said they would like to if it were cheaper. 'V' locates the implicit decimal in a fixed point number. 
To specify a particular data item, for instance one of the items contained within the sale-date group, the programmer would use the-year IN sale-date (or the equivalent the-year OF sale-date). The relative influences of which languages were used continues to this day in the recommended advisory printed in all COBOL reference manuals: COBOL is an industry language and is not the property of any company or group of companies, or of any organization or group of organizations. The DoD operated 225 computers, had a further 175 on order and had spent over $200 million on implementing programs to run on them. The JCL, written in July 2015, is derived from the Hercules tutorials and samples hosted by Jay Moseley. A 77 level-number indicates the item is stand-alone, and in such situations is equivalent to the level-number 01. The delegation impressed Charles A. Phillips, director of the Data System Research Staff at the DoD,[20] who thought that they "thoroughly understood" the DoD's problems. At a time when new programming languages were proliferating at an ever-increasing rate, the same survey suggested that if a common business-oriented language were used, conversion would be far cheaper and faster. [138], A PICTURE (or PIC) clause is a string of characters, each of which represents a portion of the data item and what it may contain. [160] GO TOs were largely replaced by the PERFORM statement and procedures, which promoted modular programming[160] and gave easy access to powerful looping facilities. ] But when a PERFORM statement executes, it modifies the continuation address of the called procedure (or the last procedure of the called range, if PERFORM THRU was used), so that control will return to the call site at the end.
[124], COBOL 2002 also introduced free-format code. This can be used to implement decision tables. This resulted in "severe" criticism. | COBOL's syntax is usually described with a unique metalanguage using braces, brackets, bars and underlining.
_ ON [70] These made up 44 changes, which rendered existing statements incompatible with the new standard. and COBOL 2014 was six years late.
[99][191] [77] This version was known as American National Standard (ANS) COBOL and was adopted by ISO in 1972. The reader should be cautioned that although the 1997. [112], In 2006 and 2012, Computerworld surveys (of 352 readers) found that over 60% of organizations used COBOL (more than C++ and Visual Basic .NET) and that for half of those, COBOL was used for the majority of their internal software. [144]
Later that year, the Data Processing Management Association (DPMA) said it was "strongly opposed" to the new standard, citing "prohibitive" conversion costs and enhancements that were "forced on the user". Many compilers still support it,[154] [88] [53][54], The specifications were presented to the Executive Committee on 4 September. [127] Method overloading was added in COBOL 2014.[128]. _ There were many other new features, many of which had been in the CODASYL COBOL Journal of Development since 1978 and had missed the opportunity to be included in COBOL-85. The presence of other formatting characters define edited numeric or edited alphanumeric data items. Fewer than a dozen of the responses were in favor of the proposed standard.[92]. It also lacked a demonstrable implementation,[28] allowing supporters of a FLOW-MATIC-based COBOL to overturn the resolution. GE and IBM planned to integrate COBOL into their own languages, GECOM and COMTRAN, respectively. [161], COBOL programs were infamous for being monolithic and lacking modularization. [104], COBOL 2002 suffered from poor support: no compilers completely supported the standard. [115], By 2019, the number of COBOL programmers was shrinking fast due to retirements, leading to an impending skills gap in business and government organizations which still use mainframe systems for high-volume transaction processing.
[24], Representatives enthusiastically described a language that could work in a wide variety of environments, from banking and insurance to utilities and inventory control. In 1997, the Gartner Group reported that 80% of the world's business ran on COBOL with over 200 billion lines of code[c] and 5 billion lines more being written annually. [116], During the COVID-19 pandemic and the ensuing surge of unemployment, several US states reported a shortage of skilled COBOL programmers to support the legacy systems used for unemployment benefit management. _ Thus, when the inner invocation arrives at the end of LABEL3, it jumps back to the outer PERFORM statement, and the program stops having printed just "1 2 3". EVALUATE is a switch-like statement with the added capability of evaluating multiple values and conditions. It was also poor, lacking the funds to make public documents, such as minutes of meetings and change proposals, freely available. Many of these systems had been in the process of conversion to more modern programming languages prior to the pandemic, but the process had to be put on hold. The second PERFORM statement sets the return at the end of LABEL4 but does not modify the continuation address of LABEL3, expecting it to be the default continuation. [80], The Programming Language Committee was not well-known, however. It is also used to call procedures or ranges of procedures (see the procedures section for more details). _ [139], The USAGE clause declares the format data is stored in. Free-format code can be placed in any column of the file, as in newer programming languages. But some compilers, like IBM COBOL, will produce code that prints "1 2 3 END END END END " and so on, printing "END" over and over in an endless loop. Implementations of indexed files vary between vendors, although common implementations, such as C-ISAM and VSAM, are based on IBM's ISAM. [123] University professors taught more modern, state-of-the-art languages and techniques instead of COBOL which was said to have a "trade school" nature. [123], The focus on portability and standardization meant programs written in COBOL could be portable and facilitated the spread of the language to a wide variety of hardware platforms and operating systems. COBOL supports three file formats, or organizations: sequential, indexed and relative. The new EVALUATE statement and inline PERFORM were particularly well received and improved productivity, thanks to simplified control flow and debugging. Sixty features were changed or deprecated and 115[95] were added, such as:[96][97], The new standard was adopted by all national standard bodies, including ANSI. On the other hand, conversion to COBOL-85 was thought to increase productivity in future years, thus justifying the conversion costs.[170]. "Does Cobol's Report Writer Really Miss the Mark? Another bug is a result of the dangling else problem, when two IF statements can associate with an ELSE. A sub-committee was formed to analyze existing languages and was made up of six individuals:[24][66], The sub-committee did most of the work creating the specification, leaving the short-range committee to review and modify their work before producing the finished specification. Each report is defined in the report section of the data division. [81] [44] {\displaystyle {\begin{array}{l}{\underline {\text{ADD}}}\,{\begin{Bmatrix}{\text{identifier-1}}\\{\text{literal-1}}\end{Bmatrix}}\dots \;{\underline {\text{TO}}}\,\left\{{\text{identifier-2}}\,\left[\,{\underline {\text{ROUNDED}}}\,\right]\right\}\dots \\\quad \left[\left|{\begin{array}{l}{\text{ON}}\,{\underline {\text{SIZE}}}\,{\underline {\text{ERROR}}}\,{\text{imperative-statement-1}}\\{\underline {\text{NOT}}}\,{\text{ON}}\,{\underline {\text{SIZE}}}\,{\underline {\text{ERROR}}}\,{\text{imperative-statement-2}}\\\end{array}}\right|\right]\\\quad \left[\,{\underline {\text{END-ADD}}}\,\right]\end{array}}}. [24], The specifications were approved by the Executive Committee on 8 January 1960, and sent to the government printing office, which printed these as COBOL 60. The programmer need only specify the report layout and the data required to produce it, freeing them from having to write code to handle things like page breaks, data formatting, and headings and footings.[141]. In 1980, Grace Hopper commented that "COBOL 60 is 95% FLOW-MATIC" and that COMTRAN had had an "extremely small" influence. [123] A 1959 survey had found that in any data processing installation, the programming cost US$800,000 on average and that translating programs to run on new hardware would cost $600,000. [149] [174][175][176][177] but it was deemed obsolete in the COBOL 1985 standard and deleted in 2002.
The short-range committee was given to September (three months) to produce specifications for an interim language, which would then be improved upon by the other committees. [79], Independently of the ANSI committee, the CODASYL Programming Language Committee was working on improving the language. [153], The original (1959) COBOL specification supported the infamous ALTER X TO PROCEED TO Y statement, for which many compilers generated self-modifying code. This means that creating a record with a key of 5 may require the creation of (empty) preceding records. programming system and language.
Support for generic programming is provided through parameterized classes, which can be instantiated to use any class or interface. Relative files, like indexed files, have a unique record key, but they do not have alternate keys. Such statements may be terminated in two ways: by a period (implicit termination), which terminates all unterminated statements contained, or by a scope terminator, which terminates the nearest matching open statement. The environment division contains the configuration section and the input-output section. More complex conditions can be "abbreviated" by removing repeated conditions and variables. In contrast with modern, succinct syntax like y = x;, COBOL has a more English-like syntax (in this case, MOVE x TO y). Deleted features included the NOTE statement, the EXAMINE statement (which was replaced by INSPECT) and the implementer-defined random access module (which was superseded by the new sequential and relative I/O modules). 
[111] [188], Doubts have been raised about the competence of the standards committee. After submitting the JCL, the MVS console displayed: Line 10 of the console listing above is highlighted for effect, the highlighting is not part of the actual console output. [50][51] Another point of controversy was whether to make keywords context-sensitive and the effect that would have on readability. ", "Revised Cobol standard may be ready in late '85", "Responses to Cobol-80 Overwhelmingly Negative", "Study Sees Few Problems Switching to Cobol-8X", "DEC users get head start implementing Cobol-80", "COBOL ANSI-85 Programming Reference Manual", "Cobol remains old standby at agencies despite showing its age", "Thoughts on the Future of COBOL Standardization", "Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) About the Y2K Problem", "Federal Agencies Need to Address Aging Legacy Systems", "Closing the COBOL Programming Skills Gap", "Wanted urgently: People who know a half century-old computer language so states can process unemployment claims", "Stimulus checks and other coronavirus relief hindered by dated technology and rocky government rollout", "COBOL and Legacy Code as a Systemic Risk | naked capitalism", "COBOL Logic and Programming, third edition 1974", "Academia needs more support to tackle the IT skills gap", "Resolutions from WG4 meeting 24 June 2628, 2003 Las Vegas, Nevada, USA", "What platforms are supported by GNU Cobol?
The vice-president, William Rinehuls, complained that two-thirds of the COBOL community did not know of the committee's existence. { A PERFORM statement somewhat resembles a procedure call in a modern language in the sense that execution returns to the code following the PERFORM statement at the end of the called code; however, it does not provide any mechanism for parameter passing or for returning a result value. CALL and INVOKE call subprograms and methods, respectively. Floating-point, in either an implementation-dependent format or according to IEEE 754. However, 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. The report writer was slated to be removed from COBOL, but was reinstated before the standard was published. [76], Efforts began to standardize COBOL to overcome incompatibilities between versions. [89][90], During the first public review period, the committee received 2,200 responses, of which 1,700 were negative form letters. They are up to 31 characters long and may include letters, digits, hyphens and underscores. [183] By 1985, there were twice as many books on FORTRAN and four times as many on BASIC as on COBOL in the Library of Congress. It was observed that increasing memory would drastically increase speed and that compilation costs varied wildly: costs per statement were between $0.23 and $18.91. However, PERFORM is unusual in that it may be used to call a range spanning a sequence of several adjacent procedures.