COBOL

Grace Murray Hopper (1906 ~ 1992) One of the architects of COBOL

Business application language designed at the behest of the USA Department of Defence in the 1950's. In addition to domain specific business language features it has other tools to facilitate the writing of business software such as indexed file system with database like features, typically ISAM but in the case of IBM products VSAM.

Still relatively popular on mainframes due to huge amounts of legacy code and mature tool chains but also sees use on smaller systems for development of custom business applications.

Standards

• COBOL-60 first formal standard
• COBOL-61 published as "Cobol-1961: Report to Conference on Data Systems Languages (U.S. Department of Defence 1961). - This should be in the public domain as a DoD publication but for some reason is not. Not fully compatible with COBOL-60, but the basis for most COBOL compilers developed in the 1960's.
• COBOL-61 EXTENDED An extension for COBOL-61 with syntax clarifications and so on, arithmetic extensions mean that the language is not 100% compatible with COBOL-61. First standard that offers the sort and report writer features, although the latter is optional.
• COBOL-65
• COBOL-68 (ANSI USA Standard COBOL X3.23)
• ANSI-74 (ANS X3.23-1974) = ISO 1989:1978
• ANSI-85 (ANS X3.23-1985) = ISO 1989:1985 = DIN 66 028
• COBOL 2014 (ISO/IEC 1989:2014)

OS/2 Implementations

• ACUCOBOL-85
• Wild Hare Computer Systems Axis
• CA-Realia II Workbench
• Code/400 - AS/400 cross development toolkit
• IBM COBOL/2 - Commercial (1988-1998)
• IBM VisualAge COBOL
• Liant COBOL
• mbp Visual COBOL
• Micro Focus Cobol
• Microsoft Cobol

Libraries and bindings

• Easy Toolkit - Portability toolkit

GUI builders and Cobol CASE tools

• CA-Telon - CASE tool/application generator
• COBOL sp2

Programmer's utilities

• Exuberant ctags - Creates index files out of COBOL source files - Open source

Editor support

• Boxer - COBOL support included by default
• BRIEF - COBOL support included by default
• Preditor/2 - COBOL template with syntax highlighting

DOS Implementations

• ACUCOBOL-85
• Micro Focus Cobol
• Microsoft Cobol
• Realia COBOL
• WATCOM COBOL

IBM

• 1982: COBOL Compiler Version 1.0
• 1987: COBOL Compiler Version 2.0

Micro Focus

• 1985: Professional COBOL

Ryan-McFarland

• 1987: RM COBOL 85

GUI builders and Cobol CASE tools

• COBOL sp2

Implementations that run under WinOS/2

• Micro Focus Cobol
• Micro Focus Personal Cobol
• Microsoft Cobol

GUI builders and Cobol CASE tools

• COBOL sp2
• COBOL FormPrint

Java Implementations

• Heirloom Computing Elastic COBOL
• LegacyJ PERCobol
• Micro Focus Visual COBOL
• Veryant isCobol Evolve

Generic or cross platform source code

• COBOL grammar for Coctail - By CoCoLab
• PL/I to Cobol - Open source software that converts PL/I structures to COBOL structures, but not whole programs so far.

Publications

• David Dill: The COBOL Presentation Manager Programming Guide: For OS/2 Versions 1.3 and 2.0 - VNR 1992, ISBN 0-442-01293-4
• Robert B. Chapman: OS/2 Presentation Manager Programming for COBOL Programmers (Revised edition) – Wiley 1993, ISBN 0-471-56140-1

• Status Report of DETAB-X (Decision Table, Experimental) (1963) - Of historical interest only

Links

Tutorials

• COBOL Programming Course

USENET

• comp.lang.cobol - Still alive (mostly)
• alt.cobol - By now a dead duck, however during the 90´s a better information resource on COBOL than the traditional comp.lang.cobol group, and since google has most posting of the group archived and searchable, it is a great information resource for those working with older COBOL tools.