COBOL stands for "Common Business Orientated Language", yeap as he name applies was written for business system development.

In fact when the language was introduced it was meant to do away with programmers, managers would develop their own systems, (have heard this about vb as well). Naturally if you have had to wade through 60 + pages of a single program to find a bug you soon realises that this claim was complete rubbish

COBOL is not object orientated.

Is it obsolute...hard to say...l know of at least one software house here in oz marketing a COBOL business system. There are literally millions of lines of COBOL code still in use in the business community, banks etc. Where the systems are mission critical it would appear that financial institutions are still using the language.

Was told by a cobol programmer friend that their company is moving to aDelphi client/server solution, as Delphi was viewed as having less of a learning curve for COBOL dudes than vb, Progress, System Builder etc.

Hope this helps.