COBOL (COmmon Business Oriented Language) was the product of a US Department of Defense initiative to develop a standard and portable programming language for business applications. COBOL celebrated its 50th birthday in 2009. It is generally believed that new COBOL development is in decline but new ISO/IEC COBOL standards still evolve and a commercial commitment remains to keep the language relevant in today’s computing landscape.
COBOL (COmmon Business Oriented Language) was the product of a US Department of Defense initiative to develop a standard and portable programming language for business applications. COBOL celebrated its 50th birthday in 2009. It is generally believed that new COBOL development is in decline but a commercial commitment remains to keep the language relevant in today’s computing landscape.
Standards
The official COBOL standard is very slow to evolve due to a strong desire to keep the language relevant without compromising core strengths such as execution efficiency, interoperability with other languages and backward compatibility with earlier versions of the language.
The current COBOL ISO/IEC standard is ISO/IEC 1985:2014 Information technology -- Programming languages -- COBOL. ISO/IEC published a standard for 1985, 2002, 2014 and works on 2022.
Vendors of course continue to issue new releases of their COBOL compilers with unique non-standard features from time to time. As a consequence, COBOL dialects vary more than one might expect given the availability of standards.
Sources
There are several COBOL centered web sites where you can obtain further information:
Specific to GnuCOBOL (formerly OpenCOBOL):
Specific to Micro Focus COBOL Products:
- Micro Focus COBOL Community Forum
- Documentation for Micro Focus Visual COBOL for both Visual Studio and Eclipse
- Visual COBOL for Visual Studio Personal Edition Information and Download
Lightweight Editors with COBOL syntax highlighting
Various COBOL language code editor plugin are available:
- vscode based editors:
- Sublime
