Acronym for
common business oriented language. Developed in the late 1950s and early 1960s, COBOL is the second-oldest
high-level programming language (
FORTRAN is the oldest). It is particularly popular for business
applications that
run on large
computers.
COBOL is a wordy language; programs written in COBOL tend to be much longer than the same programs written in other languages. This can be annoying when you program in COBOL, but the wordiness makes it easy to understand programs because everything is spelled out. Although disparaged by many programmers for being outdated, COBOL is still the most widely used programming language in the world.