Teaching COBOL in computer information systems programs
Yuksel Uckan · ACM SIGCSE Bulletin · 1986
The COBOL component in four-year computer information systems programs is crucial to the rest of the program, and should be handled with special care. Particularly in CIS programs modeled after ACM's recommendations for computer information systems, students who have become reasonably proficient in a high level programming language find a course on introductory COBOL rather unmotivating. Furthermore, experience has shown that COBOL is not an ideal language as the first procedural language in CIS programs.It is our conviction that COBOL should be taught in CIS programs as a file processing language, using a data structures approach, as suggested by the ACM's IS2 component. In this paper, we propose a course description and topics sequence, and describe an implementation experiment based on the proposal. Following a brief survey of the elementary features of the language, the proposed course has aimed to teach advanced COBOL features, data and file structures, and fundamental concepts of software engineering in an integrated fashion. The experiment has been highly successful, and the course has been incorporated in our CIS curriculum at Miami University, Systems Analysis Department.