Abstract
COBOL (Common Business Oriented Language) was one of the earliest high-level programming languages. It was developed by the CODASYL (Conference on Data Systems Languages) committee, whose members were from industry, universities, and the US government. The goal of the committee was to create a common language that would be suitable for business (usually file-oriented) applications. Further, the use of such a common language was expected to reduce the cost of programming, as less time would be spent in rewriting applications for different hardware platforms. A compiler is a computer program that translates the source code of a program written in a high-level programming language into the equivalent machine code of the target machine (or into the low-level assembly language).
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- 1.
EMCC was later taken over by Remington Rand, which was later taken over by Sperry becoming Sperry Rand, and finally Sperry merged with Burroughs to become Unisys.
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It was more a linker/loader than a compiler.
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The preprocessor is performed on the source code before the next step in the compilation.
References
Aho A, Ullman J (1977) Principles of compiler design. Addison Wesley, Reading
Stern N et al (2005) Cobol for 21st century, 11th edn. Wiley, New York
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O’Regan, G. (2018). COBOL and Compilers. In: The Innovation in Computing Companion. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02619-6_19
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02619-6_19
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