COBOL, ALGOL, General Hopper

 Welcome to my first post on this new blog "TIL-this": Today I Learned This!

Today I learned that COBOL 

  • was developed in 1959, evolved from FLOW-MATIC (a.k.a. B-0, Business Language version 0), designed by Admiral Grace Hopper (nee Murray) *1906 +1992

  • because people wanted a machine independent language that resembles the English language, although FORTRAN was already there...
    (typical instructions are "MOVE value TO variable-a" etc)
    Remark: I can't understand well why FORTRAN wasn't considered convenient or "too complicated" compared to COBOL... CS students said "the symbols are too complicated, I don't want to learn symbols, we want to use english words."  ==> Symbols means the "=" sign ?! 
    • programs are rigidly divided in 4 sections :
    •  01000 IDENTIFICATION DIVISION.
 01100 PROGRAM-ID. 'HELLO'.    
 02000 ENVIRONMENT DIVISION.   
 02100 CONFIGURATION SECTION.
 02200 SPECIAL-NAMES.               
 02210     CONSOLE IS CONSL. 
 03000 DATA DIVISION.        
 04000 PROCEDURE DIVISION.   
 04100 00-MAIN.              
 04110     DISPLAY 'HELLO, WORLD' UPON CONSL.   
 04900     STOP RUN.
  • Most ENIAC programmers were women, among which Betty Holberton.

  • COBOL is still used in many large associations, mainly banks, and in particular, in 95% of all ATM transactions
  • By 1970, COBOL had become the most widely used programming language in the world.
  • In 1997, Gartner Group estimated that there were a total of 200 billion lines of COBOL in existence, which ran 80% of all business programs.
  • In the early 1990s, work began on adding object-orientation in the next full revision of COBOL. Object-oriented features were taken from C++ and Smalltalk.

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