Should COBOL come back .....?

Recently , I was going through and found encouraging ---

so I thought to present it as it is and read on ---------

Cobol, that much-maligned zombie of a programming language, simply refuses to die and has been back in the news of late--particularly in California where it made headlines for thwarting the governor's budget-cutting plans. Michael Swaine will have a little something to say on the subject in the next issue of DDJ--but until then, you can take a walk down Cobol's memory lane with this status report, written by IBM's Henry Saade and Ann Wallace for a 1995 issue of Dr. Dobb's Journal.

Cobol '97: A Status Report

Cobol gets object oriented

by Henry Saade and Ann Wallace



If you think that Cobol is a language for days past, consider that, according to the Datapro Information Services Group, an estimated 150 billion lines of Cobol source code are at work in mission-critical business applications worldwide, and programmers add about five billion lines each year. Likewise, International Data Corp. reports that revenues for Cobol desktop development are expected to increase to $176.4 million by 1998, up from $86.3 million in 1993. These figures indicate a solid average growth rate of about 15.4 percent a year. In medium-size and large U.S. companies, 42.7 percent of all applications-development staffs use Cobol. Thirty-five percent of such companies report that the language is used for more than two-thirds of their applications.

While languages such as C++ and Smalltalk garner the lion's share of attention from the object-oriented community, Cobol has also been making object-oriented strides. In particular, a proposed revision of the Cobol standard includes object-oriented extensions. The draft standard is being developed jointly by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and Accredited Standards Committee X3 (ASC X3), the latter operating under the procedures of the American National Standards Institute (ANSI). The target date for completion of the proposed standard is 1997.
While we will focus in this article on the object-oriented extensions to Cobol, we will also highlight other features proposed in the draft.

Historically Speaking
Cobol's early acceptance can be traced to the fact that it was the first stable, portable business language. Since the language was conceived in 1959 by the Conference on Data Systems Languages (CODASYL), committees have continually refined and improved it, incorporating innovative programming methods. CODASYL, ANSI, and ISO have regularly published the agreed-upon standards emerging from these committees.

With the incorporation of structured programming, the 1985 standard (ANSI X3.23-1985) introduced major enhancements to Cobol. Structured-programming concepts were part of a movement in programming methodology toward replacing unwieldy, multibranching "spaghetti" code with a more tightly controlled flow of logic. As part of Cobol, it gave users more readable and maintainable programs.
Standardization has given Cobol a high degree of reliability and portability. From the beginning, programmers wanted Cobol to be a robust language that they could use on any platform or computer. This need expanded as multiplatform installations became more common in the 1980s. Vendors met the challenge by making standard-compliant implementations of Cobol available on many platforms and systems, including mainframe and midrange computers, DOS, UNIX, Windows, and OS/2. (IBM, for example, uses the same Cobol compiler technology on MVS, VM, VSE, AIX, and OS/2.)

Today, the 1985 Cobol standard is widely accepted, and most industry and government organizations rely on adherence to it. In order to bid on government jobs, for instance, Cobol implementations must conform to the Federal Information Processing Standard for Cobol (FIPS 21-4), which is based on Cobol standards.

A New Standard
The draft 1997 proposal for Cobol incorporates the basic object-oriented programming capabilities found in C++ and Smalltalk (see Table 1): inheritance, which allows objects to inherit data and behaviors from other objects; polymorphism, which simplifies coding by letting programmers use a single interface to access objects of different classes; and encapsulation, which hides the implementation of data and methods from clients (user code), thereby protecting clients from the effects of implementation change.

’forever’ Cobol is ....?

IS COBOL ,...... ...... .... forever !!!

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With more than 95% of all the financial and insurance information being processed by Cobol, this 3GL( Generation Language ) is here to stay.

The future of Cobol

While many Cobol programmers around the world are aging, with younger programmers taking up newer languages, the global Cobol community still comprises around 2m developers.

And while there are motivations to move to newer technologies, the amount of code that some companies would have to have re-written poses a serious risk. Furthermore, the hype around newer technology does not detract from the fact that it is still good business sense to look at what is best for business process needs.

While front-end applications are increasingly becoming interactive and use more modern programming languages, back-end infrastructures still require a robust a business language like Cobol to process transactions en mases, which is why the language continues to be so important globally.

This is underpinned by the move by universities like Oxford Brooke's University and the University of Central England in the UK to begin offering an IT Management for Business degree in 2008 to boost legacy skills in that country.

In SA, the banks and insurance agencies continue to boost their COBOL skills, training hundreds of Cobol developers between them each year, while universities like Taiwanese and Wits University are investigating introducing COBOL training into IT-focused degrees, emphasizing the continued importance of COBOL locally for the foreseeable future.

Not much in IT has staying power. What is here today is gone tomorrow. The ICT landscape now changes significantly on almost a yearly basis, except for one notable stalwart, which has been around for almost 50 years - the programming language called COBOL - Common Business Oriented Language.

While the mainframe environment certainly does not have the attraction of .Net or Java, the reality is that behind the scenes, Cobol continues to be the most important programming language in the world today.

Why? Because Cobol applications account for 60% of all the applications that are currently in operation, and around 85% of all the transactions (globally) that are processed (Database and Network Journal). The Aberdeen Group estimates that $2 trillion has been invested in mainframe applications in corporations that house approximately 70% of all critical business logic and data, while Gartner says Cobol code accounts for 65% (200bn lines of code) of the total software in use.

At the Cobol Future 2007 event in Rotterdam earlier this year, it was stated that more than 60% of all company information accessible through the Internet is stored on mainframes, with 83% of all transactions and 95% of all financial and insurance data being processed by Cobol mainframes.

Do you know the reason why COBOL is still the first choice of financial institutions is - - -

because mission-critical high throughput systems require proven technology, predictability, reliability, scalability, high performance and ease of integration to function optimally.

And that is exactly what Cobol provides.

Cobol - here , there and everywhere .......!!!!!

So while most people are not aware of Cobol in their daily use of IT, if you log onto Internet banking and make a payment or transfer funds, you are actually triggering a Cobol transaction on the bank’s mainframe. Cobol is indirectly a fundamental part of most people’s lives.

And while Cobol is pre-eminent in the mainframe environment, it has also proven its worth as one of the most portable languages, and is now found on virtually all hardware platforms and operating systems around the world.

Fifty years on, Cobol has also become a first class citizen in the .NET framework, co-existing and engaging with all other languages and technologies supported in that framework.

- sources from history

Do U know GRACE HOPPER . . . ?

Grace Hopper, the woman credited with establishing COBOL (Common Business-Oriented Language) as the language of business, would be pleased to know that 100 years after her birth, the language still underpins many applications that keep modern businesses going.

This Tuesday is the Centenary birthday of Grace Hopper, who was born on December 9, 1906. Often referred to as "the mother of COBOL," her contribution to the theory and practice of programming is commonly appreciated as enormous. She is credited, among other achievements, with being the first person to develop a compiled program in an age when computers worked by running programs that were interpreted one line at a time.

Grace Hopper

Hopper got her first degree in mathematics and physics at Yale University and her master's in the same subjects. She taught at Vassar College before joining the U.S. Naval Reserve in 1943 and working on one of the earliest electronic calculators, the Harvard Mark 1. She was in her element working as, effectively, one of the world's first computer programmers--and she was very good at it. (For a comprehensive bio, read Wikipedia's entry on Hopper.)

She continued working on the Harvard Mark 1 and Mark 2 before moving to another company in 1949 to work on the Univac 1, where she developed the compiler.

After returning to the Navy, she worked on validating software written in the new language, COBOL, with which her name would be indelibly associated. Her greatest achievement in computing was here, as she gradually evolved the idea that software should be easy to use instead of being a long string of mathematical functions and notations.

From that point came the principle that programs should be easy enough for businesspeople to use and understand; in principle, COBOL is for the businessperson, not the scientist.

"COBOL is still in use today and plays a part in those programs that keep businesses running," said Julian Dobbins, director of product management at Micro Focus, one of the key companies still developing for the language. "(Analyst firm) Gartner reckons that 75 percent of business transactions are still done in COBOL."

Banks and other financial institutions are chiefly accountable for this high figure. Systems that run banking transactions, such as those used by ATM's, were largely written years ago and are still running. They are economical and efficient, and COBOL code is easy to fix if these go wrong, so, the argument goes, why change them?

As for new applications, there is little, if any, work still done in COBOL, with more modern languages, such as C++, having replaced it.

So why use COBOL today? "As a programming language, it was designed on sound principles," Dobbins said. "And you can take modern principles like Web services and service-oriented architectures (SOA), and find that it offers really very easy deployment."

But even Dobbins, who has used COBOL himself since his college days, admits that COBOL is stuck with a poor image. "I remember chatting with a programmer at a conference and talking about using COBOL in object-oriented apps," Dobbins recalled. "He said, 'Why would I want to do that? It would be like turbo charging an oxcart.' My response was to say that the world does not rely on oxcarts."

Dobbins sticks with the view that the world does rely on COBOL. Dobbins believes that the principles that make COBOL a sound language to this day are those first established by Grace Hopper and that 100 years after her birth, the world should continue to be grateful for them.

Hopper died January 1, 1992.

A feature in " 100 yrs of GRACE HOPPER '