History Of Cobol Programming Language:

COBOL is a very popular programming language which stands for Common Business Oriented Language. It is a high level programming language developed in the year 1959 by a group called the CODASYL committee. CODASYL is a brief for Conference on Data Systems Language. This committee included people from academic, user groups and computer manufacturers. The main objective of the committee was to develop a standard business oriented language and as a result of efforts of the committee the compilers became available in 1960. The American National Standard Institute (ANSI) is an organization that develops standard in numerous fields. It is

In 1968 the first ANSI version of language was developed and approved. Beginning in 1968 all major computer manufacturers and software suppliers provided compilers that adhered to the language formats specified in this ANSI version. In 1974 a second version of the programming language was developed to make it even more efficient and standardized. In 1985 a new version of the language was developed and this version is

Although other programming languages have appeared on the market and have had success no language has been able to dislodge COBOL from the market and is still very popular language widely used. More recently visual basic and java are again proving to be a tough challenge to COBOL but so far it is the dominant language in the market.

The main advantages of the language are that it is simple, portable and maintainable. The main disadvantages are that is very wordy, very rigid format and not designed to handle scientific applications.

COBOL is the most widely used computer language in the world and still dominates the market. The indications are that this language shall continue to dominate the market and there are not reasons to believe that the end for this language is near. On the contrary a new version of the language incorporating object oriented programming is due within next few years.