In today’s world of computer technology there are a variety of programming languages. Each language has its own advantages and disadvantages, so to this day there is no domination of single programming language. Perhaps the competition has also played no small role in the branching of programming languages, in any case, now we see them for what they are. What were the earliest programming languages, and how they influenced the creation of others? This article is about one of the oldest and most interesting programming languages – COBOL.
This language was invented in 1959. The project to create a COBOL was funded by the United States government, and was intended for the development of business applications. It was the first computer language using the English language. Very interesting idea that programming languages could be made similar to conventional human languages and this would make them more understandable and common. On the basis of this idea new COBOL programming language began to emerge. As a result, the language is widely used in the banking, insurance sectors and by public authorities. For 40 years, COBOL remains the main language for business computing, in the modern world it would be classified as business applications language. Almost from its inception, COBOL is ANSI-standardized programming language.
COBOL language structure consists of four main sections. This separation was necessary in order to fulfill the basic language tasks – implementation of the human vocabulary into machine code. As a result, there was a separation of machine-dependent from machine-independent elements, and separated description of the algorithm from the data description. All this has allowed COBOL become much easier to code, compared to their predecessors, getting more widespread.
In the earliest versions of the COBOL effective compilation was not possible because there was a huge variety of different data and the number of options. They were slow, but the following language versions allowed to get a fast compiler, able to compete with other types of programming languages. Although COBOL yielded abundant criticism for a lot of system reserved words, but it still had a great performance for data and files, and became practically the very first language with the “Record” data type. Many elements of the COBOL language aimed at efficient use of run time. The main advantage of COBOL programming language is that most of the programs written in it are very easy to read, because of the special syntax similar to English.
Young programmers may be terrified, because of the relatively outdated methods of writing source code, but it is worth considering the fact that many large financial companies still continue to work with the COBOL language. Professionals with knowledge of COBOL could be useful to them.
Although in today’s world we are seeing a much improved programming languages, but COBOL was a real revolutionary breakthrough in the writing program code.