1. COBOL By Rhonda Wright

2. COBOL Common Business Oriented Language

3. Outline of Presentation n History n Strengths and Weaknesses n Facts n Evaluation

4. History of COBOL n Developed by the CODASYL Committee n Business applications n Coding Forms

5. COBOL Design n Punched onto punch cards n loaded into the computer using punch card reader

6. Strengths of COBOL n COBOL is in wide use n English-like and self-documenting n promotes code writing discipline n inherently modular n machine independent n standardized n regularly updated.

7. Weaknesses of COBOL n wordy n limited n hard to learn n slow

8. COBOL Facts n 75% of the world's business data is in COBOL. - Gartner Group n There are between 180 billion and 200 billion lines of COBOL code in use worldwide. - Gartner Group n 15% of all new applications (5 billion lines) through 2005 will be in COBOL. - Gartner Group n CICS transaction volume (such as COBOL-based ATM transactions) grew from 20 billion per day in 1998 to 30 billion per day in 2002. - The Cobol Report

9. Facts continued n Replacement costs for COBOL systems, estimated at $25 per line, are in the hundreds of billions of dollars. - Tactical Strategy Group n There are 90,000 COBOL programmers in North America in 2002. Over the next four years there will be a 13% decrease in their number due to retirement and death. - Gartner Group n There are at least 10,000 "Free Agent" COBOL programmers in the US today. - The Senior Staff

10. Facts Continued n The most highly paid programmers in the next ten years are going to be COBOL programmers. - GIGA Group n Any programmer with above average skills in COBOL can quickly learn the basics of Web Enabling, at home, through self-training. - Bill Lockhart, Legacy Reservist n COBOL programmers could be the key to new IT. The legions of COBOL programmers who helped organizations get legacy applications ready for Y2K could find new work bringing those applications into the Internet age. - IEEE Computer, April 2000

11. COBOL Evaluation n Good for a first programming language n Big impact on other languages – widely used today – simple and understandable – dominant programming language in the business computing domain

12. References Www.csis.ul.ie/COBOL/Course/COBOLIntro.htm http://www.cobolwebler.com/cobolfacts.htm Cobol in an Open Source Future http://cobolreport.com/columnists/tw/part2.asp