COBOL Programming Language Help For Students

COBOL is a earliest high level programming language. The ANSI standards for COBOL have been produced in 1968, 1974, 1985. The word COBOL is an acronym that stands for Common Business Oriented Language. As the expanded acronym indicates, COBOL is designed for developing business, typically file-oriented, applications. COBOL is a simple language (no pointers, no user defined functions, no user defined types) with a limited scope of function. It encourages a simple straightforward programming style.

The COBOL standard does not belong to any particular vendor. The vendor independent ANSI COBOL committee legislates formal, non-vendor-specific syntax and semantic language standards. A computer executes program statements one after another in sequence until it reaches the end of the program unless some statement in the program alters the order of execution. The COBOL program divide into distinct structural elements.

COBOL Compiler

OpenCOBOL is an open-source COBOL compiler. OpenCOBOL implements a substantial part of the COBOL 85 and COBOL 2002 standards, as well as many extensions of the existent COBOL compilers. You can download COBOL Compiler from here http://www.opencobol.org/modules/mydownloads/singlefile.php?cid=1&lid=6

COBOL Example

COBOL example is to calculate and report a detailed property tax bill for a property owner.