Editing Computer program (section)

====COBOL====
[[COBOL]] (1959) stands for "COmmon Business Oriented Language". Fortran manipulated symbols. It was soon realized that symbols did not need to be numbers, so [[String (computer science)|strings]] were introduced.<ref name="cpl_3rd-ch2-24">{{cite book
  | last = Wilson
  | first = Leslie B.
  | title = Comparative Programming Languages, Third Edition
  | publisher = Addison-Wesley
  | year = 2001
  | page = 24
  | isbn = 0-201-71012-9
}}</ref> The [[US Department of Defense]] influenced COBOL's development, with [[Grace Hopper]] being a major contributor. The statements were English-like and verbose. The goal was to design a language so managers could read the programs. However, the lack of structured statements hindered this goal.<ref name="cpl_3rd-ch2-25">{{cite book
  | last = Wilson
  | first = Leslie B.
  | title = Comparative Programming Languages, Third Edition
  | publisher = Addison-Wesley
  | year = 2001
  | page = 25
  | isbn = 0-201-71012-9
}}</ref>

COBOL's development was tightly controlled, so dialects did not emerge to require ANSI standards. As a consequence, it was not changed for 15 years until 1974. The 1990s version did make consequential changes, like [[object-oriented programming]].<ref name="cpl_3rd-ch2-25"/>