Characteristics of COBOL Programming Language

Characteristics of COBOL:

1. Many COBOL applications consist of more than 1 million lines of code, and applications consisting of 6 million lines or more are not considered unusually large in many programming shops:

2. In “Revitalizing modifiability of legacy assets”, Niels Veerman mentions a banking company that had “one large system of 2.6 million LOC in almost 1000 programs.”

3. The Irish Life Group, Ireland’s leading life and pensions company is reported31 to have completed a legacy system migration project to rehost 3 million lines of COBOL code.

4. A Microsoft case study reported that Simon & Schuster had a code inventory of some 5 million lines of COBOL code.

5. The Owens and Minor case study mentioned earlier reported that “the company ran its business on 10 million lines of custom COBOL/CICS code”.