Editing COBOL (section)

===COBOL-61 to COBOL-65===
{{quote box
 | quote=It is rather unlikely that Cobol will be around by the end of the decade.
 | width=30%
 | source=Anonymous, June 1960<ref>{{cite journal | url=https://books.google.com/books?id=CLbHc0Acrm4C&pg=RA1-PA67 | title=In defense of Cobol | journal=Computerworld | volume=18 | issue=24 | page=ID/19 | first=Jerome | last=Garfunkel | date=11 November 1984}}</ref>
}}

Many logical flaws were found in ''COBOL 60'', leading General Electric's [[Charles Katz]] to warn that it could not be interpreted unambiguously. A reluctant short-term committee performed a total cleanup, and, by March 1963, it was reported that COBOL's syntax was as definable as [[ALGOL]]'s, although semantic ambiguities remained.{{sfn|Bemer|1971|p=133}}

Early COBOL compilers were primitive and slow. COBOL is a difficult language to write a compiler for, due to the large syntax and many optional elements within syntactic constructs, as well as  the need to generate efficient code for a language with many possible data representations, implicit type conversions, and necessary set-ups for I/O operations.<ref>{{cite book |last=Pratt |first=Terrence W. |date=1975 |title=Programming Languages: Design and Implementation |location=Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey | publisher= Prentice Hall |isbn=0-13-730432-3 |pages=361–362, 381–382}}</ref> A 1962 US Navy evaluation found compilation speeds of 3–11 statements per minute. By mid-1964, they had increased to 11–1000 statements per minute. It was observed that increasing memory would drastically increase speed and that compilation costs varied wildly: costs per statement were between $0.23 and $18.91.{{sfn|Bemer|1971|p=134}}

In late 1962, IBM announced that COBOL would be their primary development language and that development of COMTRAN would cease.{{sfn|Bemer|1971|p=134}}

The COBOL specification was revised three times in the five years after its publication. COBOL-60 was replaced in 1961 by COBOL-61. This was then replaced by the COBOL-61 Extended specifications in 1963, which introduced the sort and report writer facilities.{{sfn|Brown|1976|p=48}} The added facilities corrected flaws identified by Honeywell in late 1959 in a letter to the short-range committee.{{sfn|Beyer|2009|p=297}} COBOL Edition 1965 brought further clarifications to the specifications and introduced facilities for handling [[mass storage]] files and [[table (information)|tables]].{{sfn|CODASYL|1969|loc=§ I.2.2.4}}