COBOL

COBOL

COBOL was developed in 1959 by the Committee on Data Systems Languages (Codasyl). The Codasyl committee named the language they created COBOL, for Common Business Oriented Language. As the name implies, it was specifically targeted at the needs of business computing applications. Today, COBOL is perhaps best known for being the greatest source of potential Year 2000 (Y2K) problems. Much of this reputation is due to the fact that many COBOL programs still in operation were originally developed many years ago and were never expected to last until the turn of the century. COBOL is still the primary development environment for many mainframe applications, however it has never seen much use in the Unix or PC world.