Re: [Q]: How many lines of Cobol running worldwide???

From: Thane Hubbell (thaneh_at_softwaresimple.com)
Date: 01/07/04 

Date: 7 Jan 2004 12:24:28 -0800

You can also get into the whole "what's a line of code". Pre or post
copybook expansion? Comments - do they count? Etc etc...

A relatively small system I maintain has 140,000 lines of code
precopybook expansion and including comments.

Arnold Trembley <arnold.trembley@worldnet.att.net> wrote in message news:<0zNKb.2083$Ub6.63921@bgtnsc04-news.ops.worldnet.att.net>...
> LX-i wrote:
> > Francis ANDRE wrote:
> > (snip)
> >> 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??
> >
> >
> > Billions sounds right to me. Our one little Air Force aircraft
> > maintenance system has about 1.2M, and the supply system we interface
> > with has close to 5M.
> >
> >
>
> In 1996, as part of a Y2K project, we counted up how many COBOL
> programs and lines of code we had in production in order to estimate
> the scope of our Y2K work. It worked to something like 4,500
> production programs and about 7 million lines of code. This was a
> shop with maybe 100 to 150 actual programmers. Of course, the number
> is a moving target as new programs are written, existing programs are
> enhanced (usually resulting in a slight increase in LOC), and even
> occasionally deleting an old program.
>
> I can easily believe the number would be in the billions just for the
> USA, but there's no way to actually count it. We missed some programs
> that weren't stored in the proper libraries.