Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
renamed the Commercial Translator), a proposed IBM product that
existed only as a specifi cation document. Other manufacturers such as
Sylvania and RCA were also working on the development of similar
languages. Indeed, one of the primary goals of the Short-Range Committee
was to “nip these projects in the bud” and provide incentives for manu-
facturers to standardize on the CBL rather than pursue their own inde-
pendent agendas. Other languages considered were Autocoder III,
SURGE, FORTRAN, RCA 501 Assembler, Report Generator, and APG-
1.
32
At the fi rst meeting of one of the Short-Range Committee task
groups, for example, most of the time was spent getting statements of
commitment from the various manufacturers.
33
From the start, the process of designing the CBL was characterized
by a spirit of pragmatism and compromise. The Short-Range Committee,
referred to by insiders as the PDQ (“pretty darn quick”) Committee,
took seriously its charge to work quickly to produce an interim solution.
Remarkably enough, less than three months later the committee had
produced a nearly complete draft of a proposed CBL specifi cation. In
doing so, the CBL designers borrowed freely from models provided by
Remington Rand UNIVAC's FLOW-MATIC language and the IBM
Commercial Translator. In a September report to the Executive Committee
of CODASYL, the Short-Range Committee requested permission to con-
tinue development on the CBL specifi cation, to be completed by December
1, 1959. The name COBOL (Common Business Oriented Language) was
formally adopted shortly thereafter. Working around the clock for the
next several months, the PDQ group was able to produce its fi nished
report just in time for its December deadline. The report was approved
by CODASYL, and in January 1960 the offi cial COBOL-60 specifi cation
was released by the U.S. Government Printing Offi ce.
The structure of the COBOL-60 specifi cation reveals its mixed origins
and commercial orientation. Although from the beginning the COBOL
designers were concerned with “business data processing,” there was
never any attempt to provide a real defi nition of that phrase.
34
It was
clearly intended that the language could be used by novice programmers
and read by managers. For example, an instruction to compute an
employee's overtime pay might be written as follows:
MULTIPLY NUMBER-OVTIME-HRS BY OVTIME-PAY-RATE
GIVING OVTIME-PAY-TOTAL
It was felt that this readability would result from the use of English-
language instructions, although no formal criteria or tests for readability
