Cobol400tutorial.com
COBOL-Common Business Oriented Language was introduced for Business purpose applications by the CODASYL Committee (Conference on Data Systems Languages) in 1960.it is a high level language, hence the Cobol program can be executed on the system on which compiler is available.
COBOL programs are used globally in military agencies,insurance companies,banks and commercial enterprises.95% financial enterprises are using COBOL in US.
COBOL is a standard language that can be compiled and executed on machines such as IBM AS/400.
There are 80 columns in a line of coding sheet.
Column Field
1-3 PAGE Number (automatically increased along with the lines of code)
4-6 Line Number (1-6 Sequence number- automatically increased)
7 Continuation (-)/Comment (*)/Printer Stopper (/), Debugging indicator (D)
8-11 Area A (All divisions, sections, paragraphs should be Area A)
12-72 Area B (All other statements and sentences should be in Area B)
73-80 programmer identification /mark-id
An * (Asterisk) in column 7 indicates a comment line and the entry is not compiled to produce object code. Compiler ignores them, anything that is included in comments.
- Based on the usage of COBOL, programs are divided into two types:
- Batch
- Online
| Batch | Online |
| Batch program needed JCL (Job control language) or CL (Control Language) to execute. | Online programs trigger immediately when user initiates the task and not need any control language to execute. |
| Batch programs run detached from terminal | Online programs run connected from terminal to initiate the tasks. |
| Batch programs are the execution of series of jobs with user input. | Online programs prompts the user to provide the input. |
