EDUCBA

EDUCBA

MENUMENU
  • Free Tutorials
  • Free Courses
  • Certification Courses
  • 600+ Courses All in One Bundle
  • Login
Home Software Development Software Development Tutorials Software Development Basics What is COBOL?
Secondary Sidebar
Software Development Basics
  • Basics
    • Microsoft Expression Web
    • IDE
    • Microsoft Flow
    • Unity Dashboard
    • Servlet Dispatcher
    • Types of Algorithms
    • Vue.js? nextTick
    • Vue.js Transition
    • Page Replacement Algorithms
    • What is CLI
    • Open Source Software
    • Solve Problems With Technology (Simple)
    • What is Application Software & Types
    • Microsoft Word Alternative
    • ADDIE Model
    • V-model advantages and disadvantages
    • Gatsby Plugins
    • Putty version
    • Xampp versions
    • Avro converter
    • Avro Data Types
    • Avro Schema Evolution
    • Avro Serialization
    • Cloudera Impala
    • Cloudera Careers
    • Entity Framework Core
    • Gulp File Include
    • Gulp Autoprefixer
    • Gulp File
    • Gulp Terser
    • System Software Tools
    • System Software Components
    • Typography App
    • Software as a Service (Saas)
    • Icon Font Pack
    • Interpret Results Using ANOVA Test
    • Blogging Insights Your Analytics
    • Increase Productivity Technology
    • Free Multimedia Software
    • Information Technology Benefits
    • What is SPSS and How Does It Work
    • Learn to Code For Beginners (Advance)
    • Uses of Coding
    • Uses Of Raspberry Pi
    • What Is System Design
    • Introduction to NLP
    • What is MapReduce
    • What is SoapUI
    • What is MVC
    • What is Multithreading
    • What is Neural Networks
    • What is Swift
    • What is PLC
    • What is Open Cart
    • What is Mainframe
    • What is JMS
    • What is Cognos
    • What is Open Source
    • What is Bot
    • What is SOAP
    • What is COBOL
    • What is GraphQL
    • What is Microcontroller
    • What is Open-Source License
    • What is Visual Studio Code
    • What is Pandas
    • What is Hypervisor
    • What is Common Gateway Interface
    • What is IDE?
    • What is MVC Design Pattern
    • What is Application Server
    • What is GPS
    • What is Botnet
    • What is Assembly Language
    • System Analysis And Design
    • HTTP Caching
    • What is Buffer Overflow
    • What is Ajax
    • What is Appium
    • What is SVN
    • What is SPSS
    • What is WCF
    • What is Groovy
    • What is Clickbait
    • What is SOA
    • What is GUI
    • What is FreeBSD
    • What is WebSocket
    • What is WordPress
    • What is OSPF
    • What is Coding
    • What is Raspberry Pi
    • HTTP Cookies
    • What is Hub?
    • What is Bridge
    • What is Switch
    • What is Internet Application
    • What is Sensors
    • What is Proximity Sensors
    • What is Full Stack
    • System Design Interview Questions
    • What is Salesforce technology
    • What is Salesforce Sales Cloud
    • What is OOP
    • What is CMD
    • What is React
    • React Redux Typescript
    • What is DSS
    • What is SVG
    • SVG File
    • Bash Sleep Command
    • What is MTU
    • What is Apex
    • What is Desktop Software
    • Tor Browser, Anonymity and Other Browsers
    • Avoid Pitfalls of Shadow IT
    • Freelance Web Graphic Designer
    • What is Storage Virtualization
    • What is Web Services?
    • What is Social Networking?
    • What is Microservices Architecture?
    • Microservices Tools
    • Advantages of Microservices
    • Uses of Internet
    • Software Platforms
    • Uses of Internet for Business
    • Architecture of Web Services
    • Web Application Testing
    • Advantages of Web Service
    • CPU Virtualization
    • Types of Web Services
    • Web Services Testing
    • What is RabbitMQ?
    • RabbitMQ Architecture
    • Advantages of Bitcoin
    • LINQ foreach
    • Penetration Testing Services
    • Puppet Alternatives
    • What is Memcached?
    • What is Browser?
    • Types of Satellites
    • Model Driven Architecture
    • Types of Variables in Statistics
    • Best Statistics Certifications
    • Integration Architecture
    • What is API Integration?
    • What is Grid Computing?
    • Asus File Manager
    • What is GPRS?
    • What is Gradle?
    • What is Basecamp?
    • Software System Architecture
    • GSM Architecture
    • What is Nagios?
    • AppDynamics Tool
    • Logical Architecture
    • What is Microsoft Planner
    • What is Circuit Switching
    • What is ARM?
    • Embedded Control Systems
    • Embedded System Programming
    • Embedded System Development
    • Embedded Systems Software
    • Embedded System Project
    • Types of Embedded Systems
    • Requirement Engineering
    • Types of Engineering
    • What is WAP
    • What is Registry?
    • What is Dynatrace?
    • What is Digital Forensics?
    • Hardware Virtualization
    • AppDynamics Careers
    • Bandwidth Monitoring Tools
    • Ping Monitor Tools
    • Dynatrace Tools
    • What is Trello?
    • What is AppDynamics?
    • What is Remote Desktop?
    • What is Extranet?
    • What is LTE Network?
    • What is Firebase?
    • Website Monitoring Tool
    • Number Systems
    • Service Desk Manager
    • Static Website
    • Dynamic Website
    • What is Email?
    • What is URL Link?
    • What is Program?
    • What is Lock Screen?
    • What is Grafana
    • Unguided Media Transmission
    • IT Governance
    • IT Governance Framework
    • Remote Support Softwares
    • What is Unification?
    • Topological Map
    • What is LAMP?
    • USB Flash Drive
    • Software Development Models
    • Digital Circuit
    • What is Webpack?
    • Fault Tolerance
    • What is DSL Modem?
    • What is Mozilla Firefox?
    • What is Vagrant?
    • Types of Research Methodology
    • Grafana Plugins
    • Ionic Components
    • Nginx Error_page
    • Nginx Include
    • Nginx Version
    • Nginx Force HTTPS
    • Nginx Environment Variables
    • Nginx Container
    • RabbitMQ Routing Key
    • CakePHP
    • Telegram Features
    • What is CDN
    • RethinkDB
    • Symfony Version
    • UWP
    • cPanel version
    • What is assembly?
    • Seed7
    • Switching Techniques
    • OCaml
    • Pseudocode?Algorithm
    • Quality Control Methods
    • What is OneNote?
    • Workstation Uses
    • Soft Computing Techniques
    • Remote Access Software
    • Remote Desktop Tools
    • OneNote Shortcuts
    • Software Review
    • What is Qubit?
    • Static Analysis Tools
    • Register in Microprocessor
    • What is VDI?
    • What is Svelte?
    • RabbitMQ Version
    • Groovy Version
    • Code Walkthrough
    • What is Telegram?
    • Gradle Version
    • What is Recycle Bin?
    • What is Cordova?
    • Swagger version
    • Doxygen
    • Phalcon
    • Metasploit Framework
    • Microsoft Word Shortcut Keys
    • Wordpad shortcut keys
    • Burp Suite
    • Google Docs Shortcuts
    • Install VPN
    • Frontend Challenges
    • CodeIgniter Version
    • VMware Tools
    • CDMA Advantages
    • CDMA Uses
    • Servlet Session Management
    • ServletConfig
    • Servlet Class
    • Log4j Version
    • Remote Desktop Softwares
    • Soapui Load Test
    • Scikit Learn Version
    • VMware Benefits
    • Google Slides Shortcuts
    • What is XAMPP?
    • What is PyGTK?
    • VMware Fusion
    • What is cPanel?
    • Ubuntu Version
    • Server Types
    • App Analytics Tools
    • DNS Types
    • Evernote Features
    • Restful architecture
    • GNOME Keyboard Shortcuts
    • AngelScript
    • NativeScript Layouts
    • PowerPoint Version
    • setInterval Function
    • Shopify Apps
    • TypeScript foreach loop
    • Socio Technical System
    • PowerPoint Shortcut Keys
    • Civil Engineering Tools
    • OpenLayers vs Leaflet
    • Circuit Switching Advantages and Disadvantages
    • LotusScript
    • Multiplexer
    • Multiple Access Protocol
    • Types of Broadband
    • What is Standardization
    • Methods of Development
    • Software Requirement Specification
    • CentOS restart network
    • Bouncy numbers
    • Burp suite proxy
    • Redshift window functions
    • Mesh Topology Advantages and Disadvantages
    • What is Zabbix?
    • Test Techniques
    • Test Development
    • What is PyCharm
    • What is REST
    • JDBC version
    • System software features
    • Ableton versions
    • Unreal engine version
    • RAD advantage disadvantage
    • Incremental Model Advantage and Disadvantage
    • Disadvantages of Internet
    • What is VoIP
    • WAP Architecture
    • CentOS unzip
    • Cubase Shortcuts
    • Cubase Versions
    • Libreoffice shortcut keys
    • Archiving Software
    • Layered Architecture
    • Coverage Types
    • What is Kivy?
    • Types of Methodology
    • Swift JSON
    • JSON Serialize
    • TypeScript?boolean
    • TypeScript keyof object
    • TypeScript RegEx
    • TypeScript?date
    • TypeScript object
    • CentOS Version
    • XSLT if else
    • Binary Search JavaScript
    • Binary search with recursion
    • PLSQL Replace
    • Evernote Notes
    • Rust vs Python
    • Test Scenario
    • Deadlock in Operating System
    • MVVM Architecture
    • MVVM Flutter
    • What is Keyboard
    • WordPress Hosting
    • Software requirement
    • CentOS Add User to Group
    • Backup Types
    • Firewall Rules
    • Microprocessor Features
    • Maven Versions
    • OneNote features
    • Binary search tree insertion
    • Quick sort algorithm
    • B+ tree insertion
    • What is Automation?
    • What is Digital Electronics?
    • Wireless Transmission Media
    • Border Gateway Protocol
    • Email Encryption Software
    • Endpoint Encryption
    • Outlook Alternative
    • What is Abacus
    • Encapsulation Benefits
    • FL Studio Keyboard Shortcuts
    • NordVPN Features
    • Statsmodels API
    • Statsmodels Linear Regression
    • Buzz number
    • Krishnamurthy Number
    • What is Compact Disc?
    • Bucket Sort Algorithm
    • Insertion Sort Algorithm
    • Redis Version
    • Chatbot Benefits
    • Full Stack Technologies
    • Civil Engineering Types
    • Tomcat Native
    • Tkinter Scrolledtext
    • Anaconda Navigator
    • UML Class Diagram
    • System Monitoring Tool
    • Drupal Features
    • Drupal Free Themes
    • Drupal Modules
    • Drupal 9
    • Drupal Developer
    • Drupal Webform
    • Drupal 8
    • Drupal 8 Themes
    • Drupal Views
    • System Software Functions
    • What is Linker?
    • What is K Map?
    • Website Testing Tool
    • TypeScript map
    • TypeScript enum
    • TypeScript class
    • Hill Climbing Algorithm
    • Hashmap and Hashtable
    • Nexus Plugin
    • Entity Framework Delete by ID
    • What is NumPy?
    • What is NLP?
    • Vishing Attack
    • Test Plan in Software Testing
    • Guest Mode
    • What is Mockito?
    • Advantage of the Internet
    • SVG Creator
    • Rails Logger
    • Intellij Plugins
    • Intellij Shortcuts
    • IntelliJ Maven
    • IntelliJ JavaFX
    • IntelliJ Lombok Plugin
    • IntelliJ Format Code
    • IntelliJ gitignore
    • IntelliJ Find and Replace
    • RESTEasy

What is COBOL?

By Priya PedamkarPriya Pedamkar

What is COBOL

Introduction to COBOL

COBOL stands for Common business-oriented programming language. It is one of the first high-level programming languages developed in 1959 by combining the US government, Universities, and Industry people. ANSI is responsible for developing updated COBOL standards every year from starting onwards. It is mainly used by military and government officials.

What is COBOL?

As we discussed above, It is a high-level programming language designed for business purposes. It was the first language designed for an operating system, and many industries and institutions using the programming language. It was designed mainly for finance, human resources, and other accepts of business. This language is mostly based on English words and phrases, and it is easy to understand and use. It is mostly used in financial institutions like banks, insurance companies, etc.

Start Your Free Software Development Course

Web development, programming languages, Software testing & others

Understanding COBOL

This language is self-documented, and it is easy to understand even for non-technical people as it is the main objective of the COBOL design principle so that managers and other officials can easily understand the program, whereas the other high language programs are complex to understand by them. Furthermore, it is a very simple programming language without any pointers, user-defined functions, data types, and its main programming style is straightforward programming. Therefore, it is easily applied to the complexity that lies in business logic needs to encode and program in this language.

How does COBOL make working easy?

This language is very easy to use in the work environment due to its features such as self-documentation, easy-to-understand, and simple language without any complex structures. The applications are being used in past years. They are the long-lived application written in millions of code lines in this language in a sophisticated way so that the new programming languages can’t easily replace them. The code written in this language looks like written in a structured document where each line of codes is specific to a certain purpose, and it follows the structural hierarchy.

What can you do with COBOL?

This language is used to program the applications for business, government offices, military applications, and most of the government applications in the US and welfare organizations also run on these applications. Some companies calculate a cibil score or credit ratings of the companies and most of the bank systems and software in the society in and around the UK. It also used in the insurance industry.

Working with COBOL?

We can say working with it is a little difficult, as it will be mainly used in mainframe applications where we need to use this files we need to import them as a source that contains data in text and binary format. This file format is a little different from the standard ANSI format. If you want to work with copybooks of COBOL, we need to import as .cbl file while using with the designer in Informatica we need to insert in the template using copy command of the Cobol, and both .cpy and .cbl files need to be in the same directory; otherwise, we need to mention the location of the .cpy file.

Advantages

Some of the advantages of this programming language are that it is self-documented, easy to understand and read, can handle huge volumes of data easily, better language to use for business applications, easy to use for development and maintain the applications, portable across platforms without re-compilation and robust. There are many tools available for testing, debugging and analysis of the COBOL applications. It is widely used across business applications and easy to maintain.

Required Skills

COBOL skills are in demand as there are huge code and applications still used by so many companies, but people having these skills are very less in number. We need to have other programming skills like Java besides COBOL to survive in the industry as many old applications are migrated to new technologies.

Why should we use COBOL?

We should use this as it is easy to understand, self-documented, use, develop, and maintain the applications. We have so many programming languages available but still for customer data processing in banks, insurance companies, and government applications uses COBOL as it is good at dealing with such kind of data with data types and data structures suits for that data.

Scope

COBOL programming language has different levels of scope within a program, but mostly it will use a static scope but not a dynamic scope like modern programming languages. It has program scope, external variables, and nested program scope. But all the above will be considered as global scope only.

Why do we need COBOL?

We need COBOL programming language as many of the bank applications, insurance applications, military, and government applications are long back written in the COBOL, and they are still in use as it is standard for such a long time. It is the best language in those days, which has the capability to handle batch jobs, sequential processing, file access, and reports. It is still used across industries as it is profitable.

Who is the right audience for learning COBOL technologies?

People who are looking to make their career in the mainframe technologies, working on projects where they need to convert COBOL applications to other programming languages. Who is looking to make a career in banking, Insurance, and government sectors can learn it as there are many applications written in it and a lack of people to maintain. So people who are looking to make their career in mainframe technologies, porting applications from COBOL to other languages are the major audience who learns COBOL technologies.

How Does It Help in Career growth?

It helps in career growth a little bit only as there is very little demand compared to the other modern programming languages. So compared to job openings available and career growth with respect to other available languages in the market, demand is less for COBOL.

Conclusion

Finally, it’s a wrap about a brief discussion about this programming language. We have discussed COBOL in various ways, like why COBOL, its uses of it, need for it, career growth, etc. I hope you will have a good understanding of COBOL after reading this article.

Recommended Articles

This has been a guide to What is COBOL. Here we discussed the Working, Required Skills, Scope, career growth and Advantages of COBOL. You can also go through our other suggested articles to learn more –

  1. What is JavaScript?
  2. What Is Python?
  3. What is SQL?
  4. What is MySQL?
Popular Course in this category
All in One Software Development Bundle (600+ Courses, 50+ projects)
  600+ Online Courses |  3000+ Hours |  Verifiable Certificates |  Lifetime Access
4.6
Price

View Course

Related Courses

Software Testing Training (11 Courses, 2 Projects)4.9
Selenium Automation Testing Training (11 Courses, 4+ Projects, 4 Quizzes)4.8
Appium Training (2 Courses)4.7
JMeter Testing Training (3 Courses)4.7
Primary Sidebar
Footer
About Us
  • Blog
  • Who is EDUCBA?
  • Sign Up
  • Live Classes
  • Corporate Training
  • Certificate from Top Institutions
  • Contact Us
  • Verifiable Certificate
  • Reviews
  • Terms and Conditions
  • Privacy Policy
  •  
Apps
  • iPhone & iPad
  • Android
Resources
  • Free Courses
  • Java Tutorials
  • Python Tutorials
  • All Tutorials
Certification Courses
  • All Courses
  • Software Development Course - All in One Bundle
  • Become a Python Developer
  • Java Course
  • Become a Selenium Automation Tester
  • Become an IoT Developer
  • ASP.NET Course
  • VB.NET Course
  • PHP Course

ISO 10004:2018 & ISO 9001:2015 Certified

© 2023 - EDUCBA. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. THE CERTIFICATION NAMES ARE THE TRADEMARKS OF THEIR RESPECTIVE OWNERS.

EDUCBA
Free Software Development Course

Web development, programming languages, Software testing & others

By continuing above step, you agree to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy.
*Please provide your correct email id. Login details for this Free course will be emailed to you
EDUCBA

*Please provide your correct email id. Login details for this Free course will be emailed to you

Let’s Get Started

By signing up, you agree to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy.

EDUCBA

*Please provide your correct email id. Login details for this Free course will be emailed to you
EDUCBA

*Please provide your correct email id. Login details for this Free course will be emailed to you
EDUCBA Login

Forgot Password?

By signing up, you agree to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy.

This website or its third-party tools use cookies, which are necessary to its functioning and required to achieve the purposes illustrated in the cookie policy. By closing this banner, scrolling this page, clicking a link or continuing to browse otherwise, you agree to our Privacy Policy

Loading . . .
Quiz
Question:

Answer:

Quiz Result
Total QuestionsCorrect AnswersWrong AnswersPercentage

Explore 1000+ varieties of Mock tests View more