COBOL PROGRAMING LANGUAGE

                            COVER PAGE OF COBOL 60 PRGRAMING LANGUAGE                     Lack of structure In the 1970s, adoption of the structured programming paradigm was becoming increasingly widespread. Edsger Dijkstra, a preeminent computer scientist, wrote a letter to the editor of Communications of the ACM, published 1975 entitled "How do we tell truths that might hurt?", in which he was critical of COBOL and several other contemporary languages; remarking that "the use of COBOL cripples the mind".  In a published dissent to Dijkstra's remarks, the computer scientist Howard E. Tompkins claimed that unstructured COBOL tended to be "written by programmers that have never had the benefit of structured COBOL taught well", arguing that the issue was primarily one of training. One cause of spaghetti code was the GO TO statement. Attempts to remove  GO TO   s from COBOL code, however, resulted in convoluted programs and reduced code qu

STRUCTURE OF A COBOL PROGRAM A COBOL program structure consists of divisions as shown in the following image : A brief introduction of these divisions is given below: SECTIONS : are the logical subdivision of program logic. A section is a collection of paragraphs PARAGRAPHS  :  are the subdivision of a section or division. It is either user-defined or a predefined name followed by a period, and consists of zero or more sentences/entries. SENTENCES : are the combination of one or more statements. Sentences appear only in the Procedure division. A sentence must end with a period. STATEMENTS : are meaningful COBOL statement that performs some processing. CHATACTERS are the lowest in the hierarchy and cannot be divisible.

COBOL ( common business-oriented language ) is a compiled English-like computer programming language designed for business use. It is imperative, procedural and, since 2002, object-oriented. COBOL is primarily used in business, finance, and administrative systems for companies and governments. COBOL is still widely used in legacy applications deployed on mainframe computers, such as large-scale batch and transaction processing jobs. But due to its declining popularity and the retirement of experienced COBOL programmers, programs are being migrated to new platforms, rewritten in modern languages or replaced with software packages. Most programming in COBOL is now purely to maintain existing applications.  GRACE HOPPER COBOL was designed in 1959 by CODASYL and was partly based on previous programming language design work by Grace Hopper , commonly referred to as "the (grand)mother of COBOL". It was created as part of a US Department of Defense effort to create a po