Notes | Sams Teach Yourself COBOL in 24 Hours (1998)

​I read book Sams Teach Yourself COBOL in 24 Hours (1998) by Thane Hubbell when learning about computer programming history. This helps get a basic idea of this one of oldest programming language in computer science history. 

COBOL stands for Common Business Oriented Language. It is an English-like programming language developed in 1959. COBOL is ideally suited to business processing. Business processing involves data collection, validation, updating, and reporting. A COBOL program has four divisions: Identification,Environment, Data, and Procedure. An example cobol program is as follows:

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000285     Read Dealer-File
000286          At End Continue
000287          Not At End
000288               Perform Check-Record
000289            If Use-Record
000290               Perform Print-This-Record
000291            End-If
000292     End-Read

In the US, around 80 percent of in-person transactions and 95 percent of ATM swipes are based on programs written in COBOL. ​

Last Updated: 8/14/2022