Cobol (ISO 1989:1985)
Intro to standard
Cobol is a programming language that is primarly intended for business-applications. Its main forces are file-handling, formatted screen and printer output and a huge installed base of programs written in it. You still have to format your code as if you was using punch cards. The standard has poor support for structuring big programs, but recently there has come some object-oriented Cobol-compilers that probably is much more up-to-date.Standard-resources
The standard organization ISO is on-line. They offer several documents for sale.The age shows when you look for web-pages. The web-pages is new, the language is not. There is at least one page however. It seems to be the main page for Cobol :-). (There should also be a FAQ , but it has moved, and the forward-link is obsolete.)
There are two Usenet newsgroups for Cobol:
- alt.cobol Relationship between programming and stone axes.
- comp.lang.cobol The COBOL language and software.