Re: How many lines of Cobol running worldwide???

From: Judson McClendon (judmc_at_sunvaley0.com)
Date: 01/07/04 

Date: Wed, 07 Jan 2004 11:14:40 GMT

"Francis ANDRE" <francis.andre@easynet.fr> wrote:
>
> I made some research on the net to find out how many lines of cobol were
> running in today's production systems, but I could not find out a strong
> validated and (why not audited) figure.
>
> In my understanding from the various sources, it is counting in billions of
> lines....which is quite large in term of evaluation....Does anybody could
> give me more precise numbers, specially on past, present and future
> estimations??

In the late 90's the Gortner Group claimed that between 60%-80% of all
code in use was COBOL. Don't remember any specific counts. But the
U.S. government undoubtedly has in the hundreds of millions of lines, at
the very least, very possibly billions (10**9). There are certainly billions
of lines of COBOL in existence. Are there trillions (10**12)? Not sure,
but it may not be entirely out of the question.

Considering that so much of the code being written in the 'languages du
jour' these days is obsolete in a few years, I seriously doubt that COBOL
is in danger of being replaced as the language in which more operational
code exists than all others put together. :-) 

-- 
Judson McClendon      judmc@sunvaley0.com (remove zero)
Sun Valley Systems     http://sunvaley.com
"For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that
whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life."

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