Introduction of COBOL
- COBOL stands for Common Business Oriented Language.
- It is started in 1959 by CODASYL committee (Conference on Data Systems Language).
- COBOL programs appear like an ENGLISH language.
- COBOL can handle a huge volume of data.
- ANSI (American National Standards Institute) worked further on improving this and major development took place in improvement in the year 1965 and 1974.
- The improved version of COBOL was introduced in 1985, with new features.
Example of COBOL Program
IDENTIFICATION DIVISION.
PROGRAM-ID. HELLOWRD.
PROCEDURE DIVISION.
DISPLAY “SIMPLE HELLO WORLD”.
STOP RUN.
Output
SIMPLE HELLO WORLD
Where, How and Why we use COBOL
- In Mainframe COBOL is one of the most important programming languages
- COBOL is a programming language and we use it in multiple industries like Retail, Healthcare, Insurance, Banking, Share Market, Finance and much more.
- And it is like the English language so it is self-documenting
- We can use 30years older COBOL code till now and run without any changes in modern Mainframe server.
- COBOL is a procedural language and works well in legacy applications.
- Lots of COBOL programmers are retired and this is a great opportunity for a fresher to learn COBOL to land a dream job.
- Most of the fortune 500 companies use Mainframe and COBOL is the most preferred programming language is always a ‘MUST TO HAVE’ skills for a Mainframe Developer.
Target audience
- This tutorial is for anyone, be in a student, a software engineer or anyone who is serious towards mastering the COBOL programming on Mainframe.
- If you have prior knowledge on any topic, then you can skip that topic which you are already familiar with based on your requirement.
- Most of the Mainframe Developers face a problem of low-quality content lying on the Internet and this tutorial will certainly help them.
Prerequisite and Requirements
- If you have a mainframe id, it is an advantage to learn COBOL but it is not mandatory.
- You can practice COBOL using OPEN COBOL IDE as well.
- We don’t need any previous coding language to learn COBOL.
- If you know basic TSO/ISPF and JCL, it will always help you to master COBOL programming fastly. Don’t worry, we have added TSO and JCL tutorial as well in our website, you can go through them.
What will you learn
- This COBOL tutorial starts from basics like Introduction of COBOL, Structure of COBOL and covers everything in detail.
- Our COBOL tutorial contains a lot of examples and Coding.
- This tutorial tries to show all the examples based on a real-world scenario.
- The programs explained in this tutorial is compiled and ran without any errors.
- The Quality and Quantity of the tutorial are great. The contents of this tutorial are explained by expert Mainframe Developers.