The Fortran and COBOL programming languages have both been aroundfor a long time. Fortran was released around 1957, while COBOLfollowed a couple years later. Fortran has histo…rically been mostlyused for numerical and scientific calculations, while COBOL isprimarily used by businesses. (MORE)
The advantages of COBOL has made it successful. They include itsability to run a wide range of hardware platforms, it is easy, hasa huge documentation, it non-proprietary and …it is maintainable. (MORE)
COBOL Features .
The language that automated business .
Allows names to be truly connotative - permits both long names (up to 30 characters) and word-connector character…s (dashes) .
Every variable is defined in detail - this includes number of decimal digits and the location of the implied decimal point .
File records are also described with great detail, as are lines to be output to a printer - ideal for printing accounting reports .
Offers object, visual programming environments .
Class Libraries .
Rapid Application Capabilities .
Integration with the World Wide Web (MORE)
COBOL is still used in a number of legacy applications such as finance and manufacturing industries as it is purposely designed to be fit for business application. A number of… recent developments have brought web front ends to Cobol which is likely to extend the life of Cobol even further. (MORE)
One of the advantages of Cobol is its heritage. It has been around for a very long time and proven itself in a number of major projects - many of which are still in use today.… It was designed to be suitable for transffering business logic into computer applications which is where it found its success. (MORE)
COBOL (COmmon Business Oriented Language) is commonly used to write programs for businesses. One of the oldest and most widely-used programming languages, COBOL remains the la…nguage of choice due to the clarity of its (largely) self-documenting source code, the wide availability of training materials and documentation and a large library of functions and subroutines available to programmers. In addition, COBOL has built-in support for numerical formats that are suitable for handling large amounts of money. Programmers using other languages with support for only integers and floating point numbers, must either create their own data type and define the relevant operations on it or take special precautions to ensure the accuracy of their financial calculations. (MORE)