[vincent-manis]

I haven't written a Cobol program since the 1980s, and I am hopeful I never will. Still, Cobol had many significant advances.

1. It popularized the notion of program portability, in that a Cobol program was expected to run, nearly unchanged, on any machine with a Cobol compiler.

2. It popularized the notion of data portability, in that DISPLAY data (though not COMPUTATIONAL data) should be the same, and produce the same results, on machines of disparate architectures.

3. It popularized record data types.

4. It emphasized the idea of program readability, even though we would now (I hope) reject “pseudo-English” as a solution.

The fact that it fell (far!) short of these ideals should not blind us to Cobol's significant contribution to programming languages.