How come COBOL is still used today?

COBOL is extremely well suited to business applications, and it's very easy to read, even for non-programmers. Statements like "MULTIPLY HOURLY-RATE BY TOTAL-HOURS GIVING TOTAL-PAY" are very easy to write and understand in a business environment.

COBOL has many features that favor business applications. For example, it does all calculation in decimal by default, which is extremely important for financial applications because the calculations have to be exact, and using floating-point binary introduces inaccuracies in even the simplest calculations. COBOL has excellent features for formatting data and handling databases and files, and has a complete report-writing feature that makes it extremely simple to generate very comprehensive reports.

Overall, COBOL is well suited to the applications for which it is used, which is why it is still extremely prevalent on mainframe systems … and mainframe systems still do more than three quarters of all business information processing, even though most computer-science students (and professors) today don't even realize that mainframes still exist.

I've worked in COBOL many times, and I like it. It would be lunacy to use it to write a game, a math program, or an operating system, but it works wonderfully well for heavy-duty business applications.

COBOL programming is an important niche market today. There aren't that many positions for COBOL programmers, but when a company needs one, they are willing to pay top dollar, since good COBOL programmers are scarce (whereas buckets of C++ programmers can be had for pennies).

It's more than just a legacy of several billion lines of COBOL being used in business. New COBOL coding is being written every day. It's still a good choice for business.

You can do loops in COBOL, but it's not considered good form. PERFORMs are used more often, and they are similar to function calls in other languages.

By the way, the equivalent of COBOL in the world of math is FORTRAN, which is even older than COBOL and is still the language of choice for very heavy-duty math, with zillions of lines of complex code already written and running on supercomputers around the world.

Applications Of Cobol

I agree with some of the other posters that there is a lot of code in COBOL that's in production and to update those systems takes quite a bit of time, testing, and probably the biggest factor - money. It really would not make good business sense to update something unless it's going to make your business more efficient but all of the COBOL applications I have seen are used for one thing - data entry and data processing which works very well.

Something to think about is how efficient these non-graphical data entry systems are at getting data into and out of the system. There strength is not having a GUI (graphical user interface), at least not the kind of user interface we are used to with today. Have you ever watched someone entering in data into a terminal or an emulated terminal in a hospital or another place that have mainframes. Those systems are designed for the keyboard and the user just tabs through the screen entering in data as quickly as they can type. Going to the next page is really quick to because of the lack of graphics. So from a business standpoint COBOL works just fine and if it's not broke, don't throw money at it.

That's my theory anyway.

Every product has life. Long before this COBOL got into decline phase of its life. There would be hardly any company running any program developed in COBOL. Even if they use one, support could be an issue

Because there's a couple billion of lines of COBOL that were written in the 1970s. That code has been tested repeatedly and is probably some of the most secure code on the planet. The benefits of switching to a more modern language aren't worth the cost of the time to rewrite it, test it, and then fix all the bugs that invariably get introduced in the rewrite.

Thank you for bringing memories from the past!

I learned it in two weeks with a good Hewlett Packard Manual.

Then I wrote about 300,000 lines of COBOL between 1980 an 1984 on HP3000 main frame in Iraq.

Sweet memories...

Languages like COBOL and FORTRAN are often legacy systems that do business/finance stuff.

I heard that FORTRAN/COBOL makes up 90% of code used today because it's still in banking systems/other businesses

It's often very stable and not prone to random crashes or data leaks.

In a class i heard you cant do loops, but they take care of things in a different way, so it sounds cool.

Because it is easy enough for the boss to understand ,,, from small one cash

register shops to gigantic multiple continent corporations ... from the newest

employee to the chairman ... and because you don't have to understand any

language but English. Thus, code in ALL OTHER computer programming

languages is just part of the great PONZI, falsely driving up the cost of doing

business "as unusual"! El Paco Loco