COBOL Full Form- Common Business Oriented Language
Updated on 22 February, 2024
upGrad Abroad Team
upGrad abroad Editorial Team
)What is COBOL? The full form of COBOL is Common Business Oriented Language.
One of the first extensively used programming languages was high-level COBOL, which was also for a long time the most widely used language in the corporate industry.
It originated from the 1959 Conference on Data Systems Languages, which was a collaborative effort between the business and public sectors in the United States.
COBOL was developed with two main goals in mind: readability (the degree to which a program can be easily read like regular English) and portability (the capacity of programs to be run with little alteration on machines from different manufacturers).
In the early 21st century, a lot of big institutions, like banks and government agencies, continued to utilise COBOL despite the language's declining popularity starting in the 1990s.
Why is COBOL Still in Demand?
Robert Glass noted a number of reasons why COBOL is more appropriate for business programming than general-purpose languages, including:
- Heterogeneous data must be declared, managed, and worked with by a business-oriented language. Business programs frequently use complex record structures with variable components, combining variable and fixed length strings, integer, floating-point, and decimal data with reckless abandon. Some of these problems are well known to database programmers, and object-relational mapping tools frequently stumble over these difficulties.
- True decimal data types must be used to manage business and financial data. Accounting systems need to accurately replicate the outcomes of manual calculations, even down to the last decimal place. Using traditional floating-point numbers introduces complications and mistakes.
- A business-oriented language must be able to access and work with substantial volumes of externally maintained record-structured data.
Of course, general-purpose programming languages are capable of doing all of this. However, it is built into the language of COBOL. We can argue over whether or not COBOL is necessary, but the truth is that there are hundreds of billions of lines of COBOL in use, and efforts to switch to other programming languages have not always been effective.