Category: Blogs

As you can see from this little example, COBOL is not like your normal programming language. You can’t write a compiler or a kernel module in COBOL, and the syntax is not what we’ve grown to expect. But then consider another common domain-specific language: SQL. The syntax is kind of weird, and the semantics depend…

There are actually quite a number of courses and books to learn COBOL. Many of the courses are from overseas, because offshoring firms have been meeting the demand for COBOL for years. I bought and ran through this Udemy course, which is pretty good, and among several COBOL books on Kindle, I like Beginning COBOL for Programmers by…

The source files are simple text files. Having a useful programming editor with language support is as convenient for COBOL as any other language, if not more so. The easiest thing for a beginner is to use Visual Studio Code, the only competitor for my affections since EMACS. There are surprisingly many VSCode extensions for COBOL.…

Compared to common programming languages today, COBOL is different, and in some ways very limited: you can’t do dynamic memory allocation, you can’t easily access low-level features of the operating system or particular computer architecture. The most common forms of the language can’t use recursion. You’d never want to write a compiler in COBOL. A…

COBOL stands for COmmon Business Oriented Language. One of the first of the high-level languages, it was put together by a group sponsored by the Department of Defense to develop a common business language. That group came to be called CODASYL—the Committee on Data Systems Languages—and defined a “common business oriented language,” drawing from Grace…