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

From: Judson McClendon (judmc_at_sunvaley0.com)
Date: 01/08/04 

Date: Thu, 08 Jan 2004 15:22:27 GMT

"Chuck Stevens" <charles.stevens@unisys.com> wrote:
> I know of an entire class of monolithic COBOL programs approaching half a
> million lines of (very dense) source code apiece. I grant that these are
> *generated* programs, but they are COBOL programs that are in production
> nonetheless. I suspect an estimate of hundreds of billions of lines of
> COBOL code in use worldwide is too low.

I agree, Chuck. My guess is that the U.S. government alone has more than
200 billion lines of COBOL. How many states, counties and cities in the
U.S. alone have COBOL shops twenty or thirty years old, with staffs of
COBOL coders cranking out code all that time? Now factor in the number
of businesses in the U.S. that have COBOL systems. I would not be very
surprised if in the U.S. alone there is over a trillion (10**12) lines of
COBOL. A couple of factors non-COBOL'ers don't realize is that most
COBOL programs are unique, and that there are lots of 20 and 30 (maybe
even 40) year old COBOL systems out there, chugging away, that nobody
much is even aware of. Some are running on emulators of emulators and
haven't been compiled in decades. Y2K flushed out many of those. :-) 

-- 
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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