Ralph Cuello
Sep 5, 2018 · 3 min read

I would have never thought a nice gesture on the train would actually give me something back, but it did. A cool topic to talk about for my blog post. COBOL or Common Business Oriented Language is a language created by Grace Hopper and one of our classrooms are named after her. Cobol consists of 7 divisions. So many divisions so little time.

COBOL was created in 1959. More than 80 percent of all daily transactions are processed in COBOL. It was designed from the ground up as a computer language for business, with an emphasis on inputs and outputs, whose only data types were numbers and strings of text.The financial industry is extremely reliant on it, where an estimated $3 trillion in daily commerce flows through COBOL systems. The language supports deposit accounts, check-clearing services, card networks, ATMs, mortgage servicing, loan ledgers, health insurers and more .There are 200 times as many COBOL transactions take place each day than Google searches.Every year, COBOL systems are responsible for transporting up to 72,000 shipping containers, caring for 60 million patients, processing 80% of point-of-sales transactions and connecting 500 million mobile phone users. COBOL manages our train timetables, air traffic control systems, holiday bookings and supermarket stock controls.

000100 IDENTIFICATION DIVISION.
000200 PROGRAM-ID. HELLO-WORLD.
000300 PROCEDURE DIVISION.
000400 DISPLAY 'Hello, world!'.
000500 STOP RUN.
  • “record-structure” data
  • decimal arithmetic
  • convenient report generation
  • - accessing and manipulating masses of data

COBOL needs to written in a format acceptable to the compilers. Similar to syntax COBOL programs were written on COBOL coding sheets (now a procedure that allows compilers to differentiate between statements. The coding sheet is then A mainframe is the central data repository, or hub, in a corporation’s data processing center, linked to users through less powerful devices such as terminals or desk computers.

Valid:
‘This is valid’
"This is valid"
‘This isn’’t invalid’

Invalid:
‘This is invalid”
‘This isn’t valid’

Commonwealth Bank of Australia, for instance, replaced its core banking platform in 2012 with the help of Accenture and software company SAP SE. It took five years and cost more than $749.9 million. There are 200 times as many COBOL transactions take place each day than Google searches.

Best thing about COBOL is that there aren’t any pesky notifications about upgrading. The newest is from 2014. In general, versions of the language before 1985 are not compatible with the newer versions, from 1985 and later.COBOL supports code segmentation and reuse in a variety of ways. As a former Rubyist “DRY” is my best-friend. Don’t Repeat Yourself principles apply to also Cobol, we can call routines between programs through linkage. Linkage section describe the data from another program using CALL. This saves us from writing 250 billion more lines of code. Another way is to segment code inline under a PARAGRAPH in the PROCEDURE DIVISION and then call that paragraph.

PROCEDURE DIVISION.
A0000-FIRST-PARA SECTION.
FIRST-PARAGRAPH.
ACCEPT WS-ID - Statement-1 -----|
MOVE '10' TO WS-ID - Statement-2 |-- Sentence - 1
DISPLAY WS-ID - Statement-3 -----|
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