COBOL

In the late 50s, faced with the diversity and incompatibility of computers, machine languages and assemblers, the U.S. government asked specialists to build a common, machine-independent language, geared towards business applications and understandable to all, computer scientists or not.

Thus was born the COBOL (COmmon Business Oriented Language) programming language, based on English of course, and structured rather like a literary work in the form of chapters, sections, paragraphs and sentences with verbs, words and punctuation.

COBOL's original ambitions were fairly limited. It was essentially a question of being able to process large sequential files, to update them, to perform relatively simple calculations in order to edit and print thousands of lines of payroll, accounting, stock and other reports.

The language has evolved, and COBOL is now capable of processing direct-access databases, exchanging information via transmission lines, and automatically generating states. But COBOL remains a language for programmers who know how computers work.

Recent statistics (published by Fortune magazine on the basis of the world's 200 largest companies) show that COBOL is by far the most widely used language worldwide (57%) in business computing, and represents a huge financial investment in application development and maintenance.

So it's hardly surprising that COBOL language experts have turned their attention to the promising future of object-oriented programming. A proposed OO-COBOL standard is currently being validated.