Picture Definition and 416 Threads

COBOL (; an acronym for "common business-oriented language") is a compiled English-like computer programming language designed for business use. It is an imperative, procedural and, since 2002, object-oriented language. COBOL is primarily used in business, finance, and administrative systems for companies and governments. COBOL is still widely used in applications deployed on mainframe computers, such as large-scale batch and transaction processing jobs. However, due to its declining popularity and the retirement of experienced COBOL programmers, programs are being migrated to new platforms, rewritten in modern languages or replaced with software packages. Most programming in COBOL is now purely to maintain existing applications; however, many large financial institutions were still developing new systems in COBOL as late as 2006 due to the mainframe processing speed.COBOL was designed in 1959 by CODASYL and was partly based on the programming language FLOW-MATIC designed by Grace Hopper. It was created as part of a US Department of Defense effort to create a portable programming language for data processing. It was originally seen as a stopgap, but the Department of Defense promptly forced computer manufacturers to provide it, resulting in its widespread adoption. It was standardized in 1968 and has since been revised four times. Expansions include support for structured and object-oriented programming. The current standard is ISO/IEC 1989:2014.COBOL statements have an English-like syntax, which was designed to be self-documenting and highly readable. However, it is verbose and uses over 300 reserved words. In contrast with modern, succinct syntax like y = x;, COBOL has a more English-like syntax (in this case, MOVE x TO y).
COBOL code is split into four divisions (identification, environment, data, and procedure) containing a rigid hierarchy of sections, paragraphs and sentences. Lacking a large standard library, the standard specifies 43 statements, 87 functions and just one class.
Academic computer scientists were generally uninterested in business applications when COBOL was created and were not involved in its design; it was (effectively) designed from the ground up as a computer language for business, with an emphasis on inputs and outputs, whose only data types were numbers and strings of text.
COBOL has been criticized throughout its life for its verbosity, design process, and poor support for structured programming. These weaknesses result in monolithic, verbose (intended to be English-like) programs that are not easily comprehensible.

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  1. J

    What do you picture in your head when you think about spacetime?

    Hi, I'm trying to learn stuff for my relativity module, and it goes on about spacetime and the 4-dimensional continuum and four-vectors and all that business. I am having trouble imagining whatever it is I am supposed to picture when people talk about this. Take this thing, i believe its...
  2. Y

    I need a clearer picture of where I need to be

    I go to Iowa State University, which is a decent college for engineering, not great. My GPA is not good right now (3.3, about to be 3.6ish after finals next week). I will try to ace every single college class for my next 2.5-3 years in college. I will tackle heavy courseloads, and still work in...
  3. J

    What is the light spot in these picture ?

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  4. G

    Fluids motion HARD. i attached the file as a PDF check picture from Q4

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  5. A

    Is the Polarity on the Voltmeter Wrong for this Mutual Induction Example?

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  6. L

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  7. Who Am I

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  8. Andre

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  9. C

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  10. E

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  11. J

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  12. P

    What's the classical picture of phi^4 scalar field theory?

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  13. A

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  14. H

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  15. B

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  16. K

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  17. M

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  18. E

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  19. G

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  20. W

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  21. S

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  22. M

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  23. JasonRox

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  24. A

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  25. M

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  26. C

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  27. G

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  28. T

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  29. E

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  30. X

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  31. X

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  32. S

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  33. J

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  34. S

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  35. M

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  36. M

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  37. I

    This picture first made me laugh then think

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  38. R

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  39. K

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  40. S

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  41. T

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    http://i662.photobucket.com/albums/uu347/TwinGemini14/showme5.gif Consider a triangular wave pulse shown traveling to the right on a rope with a speed v. Its height is h. The total length of the pulse is 3L, as shown in the figure. The vertical displacement is much exaggerated. The solid line...
  42. T

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    http://i662.photobucket.com/albums/uu347/TwinGemini14/showme3.gif The top picture to the right is the picture of the rope before the wave pulse arrives, and the bottom picture to the right is a picture of the rope after the wave pulse has arrived. Notice that the rope has to stretch in...
  43. P

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  44. L

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  45. E

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  46. J

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  47. D

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  48. E

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  49. R

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  50. Y

    Riemann sum question, with picture

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