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posted by janrinok on Friday September 06 2019, @12:42PM   Printer-friendly

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

COBOL turns 60: Why it will outlive us all

I cut my programming teeth on IBM 360 Assembler. This shouldn't be anyone's first language. In computing's early years, the only languages were machine and assembler. In those days, computing science really was "science." Clearly, there needed to be an easier language for programming those hulking early mainframes. That language, named in September 1959, became Common Business-Oriented Language (COBOL).

The credit for coming up with the basic idea goes not to Grace Hopper, although she contributed to the language and promoted it, but to Mary Hawes. She was a Burroughs Corporation programmer who saw a need for a computer language. In March 1959, Hawes proposed that a new computer language be created. It would have an English-like vocabulary that could be used across different computers to perform basic business tasks.

Hawes talked Hopper and others into creating a vendor-neutral interoperable computer language. Hopper suggested they approach the Department of Defense (DoD) for funding and as a potential customer for the unnamed language. Business IT experts agreed, and in May 1959, 41 computer users and manufacturers met at the Pentagon. There, they formed the Short Range Committee of the Conference on Data Systems Languages (CODASYL).

Drawing on earlier business computer languages such as Remington Rand UNIVAC's FLOW-MATIC, which was largely the work of Grace Hopper, and IBM's Commercial Translator, the committee established that COBOL-written programs should resemble ordinary English.

But, even with the support of the DoD, IBM, and UNIVAC, COBOL's path forward wasn't clear. Honeywell proposed its own language, FACT, as the business programming language of the future. For a brief time, it appeared the earlier business developers would be FACT rather than COBOL programmers, but the hardware of the day couldn't support FACT. So, COBOL once more took the lead.

By that September, COBOL's basic syntax was nailed down, and COBOL programs were running by the summer of 1960. In December 1960, COBOL programs proved to be truly interoperable by running on computers from two different vendors. COBOL was on its way to becoming the first truly commercial programming language.

It would still be the business language of choice until well into the 1980s. And it's not done yet.

"While market sizing is difficult to specify with any accuracy, we do know the number of organizations running COBOL systems today is in the tens of thousands. It is impossible to estimate the tens of millions of end users who interface with COBOL-based applications on a daily basis, but the language's reliance is clearly seen with its use in 70 percent of global transaction processing systems."


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 07 2019, @12:24AM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 07 2019, @12:24AM (#890780)

    Tab separated values is bug prone.

    You are relying on whitespace to separate fields whose data may contain whitespace. Makes it very hard to eyeball the separate fields. From a screenshot or printout this may be *impossible*.
    Plus the possibility of an editor or some point in the tool chain converting tabs to spaces. Also takes a lot of space on your terminal to display a record (as tabs typically are shown as several spaces), forcing a single record to span multiple lines. This is bad when you are looking at many records printed one after the other; can't tell records apart. Makes it a little harder to jump to a certain field in a record in a text editor by using text search to jump to the next delimiter. (Yes, I know nerdy editors can do this, but not all can, and it's not obvious how to do it in editors that can. This format is supposed to be usable by even non-programmers.)

    This is just a long way of concluding that you are better off using printable characters if you can for things.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 08 2019, @12:20PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 08 2019, @12:20PM (#891261)

    Not whitespace. Tabs. It works very well.
    If you want human readable open it in a spreadsheet application.
    <sarcasm>Or use XML</sarcasm>