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https://github.com/IonicaBizau/node-cobol - COBOL bridge for NodeJS which allows you to run COBOL code from NodeJS.

COBOL, an acronym for 'COmmon Business Oriented Language', is one of the oldest programming languages, being created in 1959. It was designed by a CODASYL (Conference on Data System Languages) committee with Grace Hopper. It is primarily used in business, finance and administration for companies and governments. It is primarily an imperative, structured language, with support for object-oriented programming added in 2002.

• COBOL 60 was the first version of the language.
• COBOL-65 added some new features to the original specification.
• COBOL-68 is the first COBOL standard and was published by ANSI. It was created to improve compatibility between the different versions of the language.
• COBOL-74 added a few more features to the language, including the ability to

  ACCEPT

  the date, day and time, and the file organization clause.

• COBOL-85 added many new features to COBOL, notably including: excplicit scope terminators (

  END-IF

  ,

  END-READ

  , etc.), the

  EVALUATE

  verb, the

  CONTINUE

  verb, inline

  PERFORM

  statements, the ability to pass arguments by content, and the deprecation of the infamous

  ALTER

  verb. This standard was followed by the intrinsic functions amendment and a clarifications amendment in 1989 and 1991, respectively.

• X/Open COBOL was a technical standard published by the X/Open Group in 1991 to facilitate uniformity of implementations and program portability. Based on COBOL-85, it excluded much of its optional modules and obsolete features, and also specified some common non-ANSI extensions that would later become incorporated into the standard, such as the screen section for TUI programming, and record locking.<ref>

  </ref>

• COBOL 2002 was published by ISO as ISO/IEC 1989. It included a host of new features, most notably including object-oriented programming. However, there were also other features, including: floating-point support, portable arithmetic results, pointers, calling conventions to other languages, function prototypes, XML facilities and support for execution within framework environments. This standard has suffered from poor vendor support, due to little commercial demand for the new features.<ref>

  </ref>

• COBOL 2014 was published on July 8th, 2014 and accepted by ISO early that summer, and then adopted by ANSI on Oct 31st, 2014.<ref>

  </ref> It includes numeric definitions following the IEEE 754 standard.

• COBOL 2023 is the latest version of the standard, adopted in January 2023. It includes the standardizations of many previously nonstandard extensions, including transaction processing, asynchronous messaging, line sequential file organization, enhanced string manipulation, boolean shifting operators and a sleep statement.

• paradigm: Imperative
• paradigm: Object-oriented

Snippet from Wikipedia: COBOL

COBOL (; an acronym for "common business-oriented language") is a compiled English-like computer programming language designed for business use. It is an imperative, procedural, and, since 2002, object-oriented language. COBOL is primarily used in business, finance, and administrative systems for companies and governments. COBOL is still widely used in applications deployed on mainframe computers, such as large-scale batch and transaction processing jobs. Many large financial institutions were developing new systems in the language as late as 2006, but most programming in COBOL today is purely to maintain existing applications. Programs are being moved to new platforms, rewritten in modern languages, or replaced with other software.

COBOL was designed in 1959 by CODASYL and was partly based on the programming language FLOW-MATIC, designed by Grace Hopper. It was created as part of a U.S. Department of Defense effort to create a portable programming language for data processing. It was originally seen as a stopgap, but the Defense Department promptly pressured computer manufacturers to provide it, resulting in its widespread adoption. It was standardized in 1968 and has been revised five times. Expansions include support for structured and object-oriented programming. The current standard is ISO/IEC 1989:2023.

COBOL statements have prose syntax such as MOVE x TO y, which was designed to be self-documenting and highly readable. However, it is verbose and uses over 300 reserved words compared to the succinct and mathematically inspired syntax of other languages.

The COBOL code is split into four divisions (identification, environment, data, and procedure), containing a rigid hierarchy of sections, paragraphs, and sentences. Lacking a large standard library, the standard specifies 43 statements, 87 functions, and just one class.

COBOL has been criticized for its verbosity, design process, and poor support for structured programming. These weaknesses often result in monolithic programs that are hard to comprehend as a whole, despite their local readability.

For years, COBOL has been assumed as a programming language for business operations in mainframes, although in recent years, many COBOL operations have been moved to cloud computing.

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