Stack Overflow
Stack Overflow

Questions tagged [cobol]

COBOL (COmmon Business Oriented Language) was the product of a US Department of Defense initiative to develop a standard and portable programming language for business applications. COBOL celebrated its 50th birthday in 2009. It is generally believed that new COBOL development is in decline but a commercial commitment remains to keep the language relevant in today’s computing landscape.

COBOL (COmmon Business Oriented Language) was the product of a US Department of Defense initiative to develop a standard and portable programming language for business applications. COBOL celebrated its 50th birthday in 2009. It is generally believed that new COBOL development is in decline but a commercial commitment remains to keep the language relevant in today’s computing landscape.

Standards

The official COBOL standard is very slow to evolve due to a strong desire to keep the language relevant without compromising core strengths such as execution efficiency, interoperability with other languages and backward compatibility with earlier versions of the language.

The current COBOL ISO/IEC standard is ISO/IEC 1985:2014 Information technology -- Programming languages -- COBOL.

Vendors of course continue to issue new releases of their COBOL compilers with unique non-standard features from time to time. As a consequence, COBOL variants vary more than one might expect given the availability of standards.

Sources

There are several COBOL centered web sites where you can obtain further information:

Lightweight Editors with COBOL syntax highlighting

Various COBOL language code editor plugin are available:

1477 questions
39
votes
4 answers

Issues with ANDs and ORs (COBOL)

I can't seem to get this one part right. I was given a input file with a bunch of names, some of which I need to skip, with extra information on each one. I was trying use ANDs and ORs to skip over the names I did not need and I came up with…
Kimmy1235
  • 879
  • 2
  • 13
  • 24
33
votes
11 answers

Why is COBOL still a preferred language in the business world?

Even though we have languages like C++, Java, Python, etc., why is COBOL still a preferred language in the business world? Why was it so popular?
Prasoon Saurav
  • 85,400
  • 43
  • 231
  • 337
30
votes
4 answers

How can duplicates be removed from a file using COBOL?

The input file have records as: 8712351,8712353,8712353,8712354,8712356,8712352,8712355 8712352,8712355 Using COBOL, I need to remove duplicates from the above file and write to an output file. I wrote simple logic to read records and write to an…
Sanjana
  • 361
  • 1
  • 3
  • 5
26
votes
7 answers

Is there actually COBOL in .NET?

I was checking Microsoft's Visual Studio page just now and in the advertisements sidebar I suddenly saw an incredible advertisement: "Net Express is a COBOL development environment for extending core business processes to the .NET Framework and…
Robert Gould
  • 65,529
  • 58
  • 177
  • 269
25
votes
3 answers

Is there a workable approach to use test-driven development (TDD) in a COBOL application?

Has anyone come across any workable approaches to implementing test-driven development (and potentially behavior-driven development) in/for COBOL applications? An ideal solution would enable both unit and integration testing of both transactional…
Paul Russell
  • 4,592
  • 1
  • 27
  • 27
22
votes
8 answers

Reading COBOL datastructures from Java

Is there a way to read COBOL data in a Java program? More concretely I'm confronted with the following case: I have a file with fixed length records of data. The data definition is done as COBOL copybooks. I think of a library which is taking into…
paweloque
  • 17,185
  • 25
  • 75
  • 131
22
votes
1 answer

What is the difference between a variable-blocked format and a fixed-blocked format?

I have encountered these terms in a data file definition document for some data that I'm getting from a Mainframe system. I failed to find definitions of these terms in any glossary or Google search - just mentions of them. Can anyone shed some…
user1845848
  • 633
  • 2
  • 7
  • 11
21
votes
8 answers

What is COBOL used for?

What is COBOL used for?
Charu
  • 2,439
  • 5
  • 30
  • 51
21
votes
9 answers

Why does COBOL have both `SECTION` and `PARAGRAPH`?

Why does COBOL have both SECTION and PARAGRAPH? Can anybody explain why the designers of COBOL created both SECTIONs and PARAGRAPHs? These have been around since the initial release of COBOL so I suspect the real reason for their existence has long…
NealB
  • 15,862
  • 2
  • 34
  • 60
18
votes
17 answers

Rewrite of legacy code

My department is currently faced with the responsibility for the task of maintaining a rather large COBOL code base. We are wondering how to add new features to keep up with business needs. COBOL programmers are hard to come by these days, and we…
Jim Denver
18
votes
3 answers

COBOL keyword REDEFINES

May I ask, what is the usage of the keyword REDEFINES in COBOL? I can not understand the manual's definition. What is the meaning of the following code? 01 WS_CHARGE_TXT_8X PIC X(08) VALUE "10000000". 01…
lamwaiman1988
  • 3,497
  • 15
  • 50
  • 87
17
votes
6 answers

Learning COBOL Without Access to Mainframe

I am a graduate student majoring in Computer Science. My department teaches the majority of its courses using Java (though I did take one course on system architecture that used C to demonstrate processor scheduling, memory management, etc....but I…
AJ.
  • 25,364
  • 15
  • 77
  • 87
17
votes
5 answers

COBOL Data types

I have confusion regarding COBOL data types. Like in many interviews it is asked to explain the difference between COMP-3 and COMP... what is the exact difference? what is the meaning of usage modes in COBOL and how is it related to data types?
Manasi
  • 687
  • 8
  • 18
  • 30
17
votes
6 answers

Cobol web development/hosting resources

I'm employed at a fairly big company here in Germany and got the job to create the main website for it which will feature: Static contents; Information and Presentations An employee area (around 6000 employees) featuring various things from…
felixm
  • 173
  • 1
  • 1
  • 4
17
votes
8 answers

How to transform COBOL programmers into modern day programmers

I'm working in a corporate environment where the mindset is hugely dominated by people who started programming with COBOL IMS and CICS. Today most of them program with more modern languages like Java. But If you look at their code and design…
tobidope
  • 554
  • 3
  • 9
1
2 3
…
98 99