What are the advantages and disadvantages of cobol?

Answer 1

What is so Good About COBOL? * COBOL is robust. There are thousands of third-party products which have been developed to aid the COBOL programmer in critical areas of testing, debugging, application analysis, production support, and code reuse.

* COBOL is capable of handling a wide range of processing volumes.

* COBOL is widely used. COBOL is the number two language for developing client-server applications. There are millions of COBOL programmers and analysts employed. Because of its advantages in the development of business applications, COBOL is still frequently used world-wide for business applications.COBOL applications are so feature-rich and are doing such an excellent job of performing mission-critical applications that the users don't really want to retire them.

* Well suited for business applications. COBOL programs are relatively easy to develop, use and maintain. COBOL is a high-level, English-like language which, when used correctly, can resemble a well-structured novel with appendices, cross-reference tables, chapters, footnotes and paragraphs. Accordingly, its greatest strength is the ease with which it adopts to almost all business-related applications.

* Self-documenting and easy to learn. Unlike other languages, COBOL is self-documenting, and even non-technical people have been known to learn COBOL within a few weeks and become productive without understanding the internal architecture of the operating environment. More importantly, when the original programmer leaves, a replacement will be able to carry on easily due to COBOL's readability.

* Easy to maintain. COBOL is very easy to maintain. Its English-like syntax and semantics allow maintenance to be done by someone other than the original programmer. Further, the source code can be referred to by users with no programming background.

* Cross-platform portability. COBOL is still the most portable language. COBOL users can transport their applications to many different hardware platforms without recompiling the source code. This important feature gives insurance against hardware obsolescence. The users' hardware investment retains its value. It is possible to upgrade to a new platform without changing a single line of code. For the developer who provides its systems on multiple platforms, this portability allows for maintenance of one set of source code. This significantly reduces maintenance costs.

* Universal training. For the last 35 years, COBOL has been taught in colleges, universities and trade schools worldwide. There are an estimated 3,000,000 COBOL programmers employed today.

* Scalable. COBOL is the most scalable language.

* There are "modern" COBOL compilers. There are COBOL compilers that provide all of the capabilities listed above under "What users want". One of them, from Acucorp, Inc., has successfully upgraded COBOL applications to open systems, client/server configurations simply by re-compiling the code.