| COBOL | … |
|---|---|
| The COBOL 60 report to CODASYL (April 1960) | … |
| Paradigm | Procedural, imperative, object-oriented, generic |
| Designed by | Howard Bromberg, Norman Discount, Vernon Reeves, Jean E. Sammet, William Selden, Gertrude Tierney, with indirect influence from Grace Hopper1 |
| Developers | CODASYL, ANSI, ISO/IEC |
| First appeared | 1960 |
| Stable release | ISO/IEC 1989:2023 / 2023 |
| Typing discipline | Weak, static |
| Filename extensions | .cbl, .cob, .cpy |
| Major implementations | … |
| GnuCOBOL, IBM COBOL, GCC2, Micro Focus Visual COBOL | … |
| Dialects | … |
| COBOL/2, DEC COBOL-10, DEC PDP-11 COBOL, DEC PDP-11 COBOL-85, DEC VAX COBOL, DOSVS COBOL, Envyr ICOBOL, Fujitsu COBOL, Hitachi COBOL2002, HP3000 COBOL/II, IBM COBOL SAA, IBM COBOL/400, IBM COBOL/II, IBM Enterprise COBOL, IBM ILE COBOL, IBM OS/VS COBOL, ICL COBOL (VME), Micro Focus ACUCOBOL-GT, Micro Focus COBOL-IT, Micro Focus RM/COBOL, Micro Focus Visual COBOL, Microsoft COBOL, Raincode COBOL, Realia COBOL, Ryan McFarland RM/COBOL, Ryan McFarland RM/COBOL-85, Tandem (NonStop) COBOL, Tandem (NonStop) SCOBOL, UNIVAC COBOL, Unisys MCP COBOL74, Unisys MCP COBOL85, X/Open COBOL,3 Veryant isCOBOL, Wang VS COBOL, WATBOL | … |
| Influenced by | … |
| Initial: AIMACO, COMTRAN, FACT, FLOW-MATIC COBOL 2002:4 C++, Eiffel, Smalltalk | … |
| Influenced | … |
| CobolScript,5 EGL,6 PL/I,7 PL/B8 | … |
| • COBOL at Wikibooks | … |
(echo:: @ ᯤ)
Footnotes
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Sammet, Jean E. (March 2000). “The real creators of Cobol”. IEEE Software. 17 (2): 30–32. Bibcode:2000ISoft..17b..30S. doi:10.1109/52.841602. ISSN 1937-4194. The Short-Range Committee worked diligently from June 1959 on, but there were great difficulties in having a fairly large committee try to create a programming language. In November, the Short-Range Committee chair appointed six people to develop specifications for consideration: William Selden and Gertrude Tierney (IBM), Howard Bromberg and Norman Discount (RCA), and Vernon Reeves and Jean E. Sammet (Sylvania Electric Products). We worked for two full weeks (including some round-the-clock sessions) in November 1959 and sent the proposed specifications to the full Short-Range Committee, which accepted almost all of them. After some editing (by the same six people), we turned in the specifications as a final report in December to the Executive Committee, which accepted them in January 1960. After some further editing, the Government Printing Office issued Cobol 60. […] [Grace Hopper] did not participate in its work except through the general guidance she gave to her staff who were direct committee members. Thus, while her indirect influence was very important, regrettably the frequent repeated statements that “Grace Hopper developed Cobol” or “Grace Hopper was a codeveloper of Cobol” or “Grace Hopper is the mother of Cobol” are just not correct. ↩
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“GCC 15 Release Series — Changes, New Features, and Fixes”. GCC, the GNU Compiler Collection. Retrieved 28 March 2026. ↩
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Technical Standard, COBOL Language (PDF). X/Open Company Ltd., U.K. December 1991. ISBN 1-872630-09-X. ↩
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Specifically influenced COBOL 2002’s object-oriented features.^{[4]}$$^{[5]}$$^{[6]} ↩
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Imajo, Tetsuji; et al. (September 2000). COBOL Script: a business-oriented scripting language. Enterprise Distributed Object Computing Conference. Makuhari, Japan: IEEE. doi:10.1109/EDOC.2000.882363. ISBN 0769508650. ↩
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Ho, Wing Hong (7 May 2007). “Introduction to EGL” (PDF). IBM Software Group. Archived from the original (PDF) on 13 January 2019. Retrieved 12 January 2019. ↩
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Radin, George (1978). Wexelblat, Richard L. (ed.). The early history and characteristics of PL/I. History of Programming Languages. Academic Press (published 1981). p. 572. doi:10.1145/800025.1198410. ISBN 0127450408. ↩
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“What is PL/B - The Programming Language for Business?”. sysmaker.com. Infopro, Inc. Retrieved 22 April 2022… conversion to an alternate, extended COBOL or to ANSI COBOL is very difficult, if at all possible ↩