Cobol – COmmon Business Oriented Language – is one of my favorite languages and the one I’m absolutely most impressed with. It is one of the oldest programming languages that are still in active use. At this time it’s 50 years since Grace Hopper created Cobol and the first compilers was subsequently implemented during the year 1960. At December 6th and 7th 1960 essentially the same Cobol program was run on two different make of computers, an RCA computer and a Remington-Rand Univac computer.

Here’s some facts that you most likely didn’t know about Cobol:

1. According to a survey done in Great Britain and USA people are in contact with Cobol around 10 to 13 time every day.

2. Of 310 billion line of software that are in use today over 200 billion lines are Cobol, that’s about 65% of the total software.

3. Every day 5 billion lines of new Cobol code are produced.

4. 80% of all daily business transactions are processed in Cobol.

5. 70% of all mission-critical applications are written in Cobol.

6. 2 trillion dollars is the total investment in Cobol systems.

And of couse the famous Hello World for everyone that doesn’t know what Cobol looks like:

      IDENTIFICATION DIVISION.
      PROGRAM-ID. HELLO-WORLD.
      PROCEDURE DIVISION.
      MAIN.
          DISPLAY 'Hello, world.'.
          STOP RUN.

Tags: Cobol

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