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Introduction: COBOL is a high-level programming language first developed by the CODASYL Committee (discussion on Data Systems Languages) in 1960. Since then, liability for developing new COBOL standards has been implicit by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI).

Three ANSI standards for COBOL have been produced: in 1968, 1974 and 1985. A new COBOL standard introducing object-oriented programming to COBOL is due within the next few years.

The word COBOL is an acronym that stands for Common Business Oriented Language. As the expanded acronym indicates, COBOL is designed for developing business, typically file-oriented, applications. It is not designed for writing systems programs. For instance, you would not develop an operating system or a compiler using COBOL.

How widely used is COBOL? : For over four decades COBOL has been the dominant programming language in the business-computing domain. In that time it has seen off the challenges of a number of other languages such as PL1, Algol68, Pascal, Modula, Ada, C, C++. All these languages have found a niche but none has yet displaced COBOL. Two recent challengers though, Java and Visual Basic, are proving to be serious contenders.

COBOL's domination in underlined by the information from the Gartner group. In 1997, they estimated that there were about 300 billion lines of computer code in use in the world. Of that, they estimated that about 80% (240 billion lines) were in COBOL and 20% (60 billion lines) were written in all the extra computer languages combined

In 1999 they reported that over 50% of all new mission-critical applications were still being done in COBOL and their recent estimates specify that through 2004-2005 15% of all new applications (5 billion lines) will be developed in COBOL while 80% of all deployed applications will include extensions to existing legacy (usually COBOL) programs.

Gartner estimates for 2002 are that there are about two million COBOL programmers worldwide compared to about one million Java programmers and one million C++ programmers.

Surprised by COBOL's success? People are often surprised when presented with the evidence for COBOL's dominance in the market place. The hype that surrounds some computer languages would persuade you to believe that most of the production business applications in the world are written in Java, C, C++ or Visual Basic and that only a small percentage are written in COBOL. In fact, the reverse is actually the case.

One reason for this misconception lies in the difference between the vertical and the horizontal software markets.

In the vertical software market (sometimes called "bespoke" software) applications cost many millions of dollars to produce, are adapted to a specified company, encapsulate the business rules of that company and only a limited number of copies of the software may be in use. A good example of this kind of application is the DoD MRP II system. This system is "used to manage almost 550,000 spare and repair parts and equipment items with an inventory value of $28 billion. The system runs on Amdahl mainframes at multiple locations throughout the U.S. and contains over 4,000,000 lines of COBOL code."

In the horizontal software market, applications may still cost millions of dollars to produce but thousands, and in some cases millions, of copies of the software are in use. As a result, these applications often have a very high profile, a short life span, and a relatively low per-copy replacement cost. The Microsoft Office suite (Word, Excel, Access) is an example of an application in the horizontal software market. Because of the highly competitive nature of this fair considerations of speed, size and effectiveness often, make languages like C or C++ the language of choice for creating these applications.

Applications written for the vertical market, on the other hand, often have a low profile (because they are usually written for use in one particular company), a very high per-copy replacement cost, and consequently, a very long life span. For example, the cost of replacing COBOL code has been predictable at approximately twenty-five dollars ($25) per line of code. At this rate, the cost of replacing the DoD MRP II system mentioned above, with a system written in some other language, would be some one hundred million dollars ($100,000,000). The importance of ease of maintenance often makes COBOL the language of choice for these applications. The high visibility of horizontal applications like Microsoft Word or Excel persuades people that the languages used to write these applications are the market leaders. But however many copies of Excel are sold, it is just a single application produced by a limited number of programmers. Many more programmers are involved in coding or maintaining one off, "bespoke", applications, and these programmers generally write their programs in COBOL.