A general purpose language that can be used to write systems software as well as business applications. Its well known strengths are ease of reading and maintenance, decimal arithmetic (including decimal scaling of binary integers e.g. pennies into dollars and cents), indexed files and record sorting. Features less well known are pointers, dynamic memory allocation, typedefs, recursion, functions within the same source file, function prototypes and ability to call other languages such as C (it can use all C libraries).
Object oriented syntax (with strong typing) was added in the 2002 Standard, similar to the way C++ was added to C. OO Cobol programs running on Windows can communicate with OLE and earlier MFC objects, and also the Windows API. XML was also added. OO has been widely ignored by the Cobol community, causing it to be regarded as a failure. Most outsiders don't know OO Cobol exists. False stories about Cobol's limitations abound, promulgated by people who have never written a Cobol program. There were religious wars in the '80s and Cobol lost. It was defeated by its own troops, who refused to leave the security of the mainframe castle. They thought time stopped in 1980.
