How does a cobol program work

Why is the declaration of variables such a mess? Do you really think someone understands 01 WS-A. Do you remember QWOP?

That old flash game where you control 4 muscles of a runner individually? You can perfectly understand the effect of each indiviual key, but you will go crazy before you get the runner to make a single step forward.

When I still went to university, I sometimes taught tutorial courses and I remember one student, whose homework was commented like this:. It tells you line for line how it does whatever it does. This is not a useful information for someone who tries to make sense of your code like the person who inherits your code when you retire.

For well documented code, readability of the fundamental building blocks is irrelevant. And this immediately brings us to the next topic:. This is a huge problem today — people just cannot inherit other peoples COBOL codes, because they cannot make sense of these codes.

COBOL programming language has different levels of scope within a program, but mostly it will use a static scope but not a dynamic scope like modern programming languages.

It has program scope, external variables, and nested program scope. But all the above will be considered as global scope only. We need COBOL programming language as many of the bank applications, insurance applications, military, and government applications are long back written in the COBOL, and they are still in use as it is standard for such a long time.

It is the best language in those days, which has the capability to handle batch jobs, sequential processing, file access, and reports. It is still used across industries as it is profitable. People who are looking to make their career in the mainframe technologies, working on projects where they need to convert COBOL applications to other programming languages. Who is looking to make a career in banking, Insurance, and government sectors can learn it as there are many applications written in it and a lack of people to maintain.

It helps in career growth a little bit only as there is very little demand compared to the other modern programming languages. So compared to job openings available and career growth with respect to other available languages in the market, demand is less for COBOL. You can also go through our other suggested articles to learn more —. Submit Next Question. By signing up, you agree to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy.

Forgot Password? This website or its third-party tools use cookies, which are necessary to its functioning and required to achieve the purposes illustrated in the cookie policy. It is the name used to identify the area of memory that is reserved for the variable. Variables must be described in terms of their size and type. To check an alpha number variable for what type of data it holds, we can use if x is number, if x is alphabetic, conditions. It is based on T or F value. If no condition is matched, then the other clause is executed.

This is quite similar to the switch statements in other languages. Skip to content. Report a Bug. Next Continue. Home Testing Expand child menu Expand. SAP Expand child menu Expand.

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