COBOL

• COmmon Business Oriented Language
• Although generally viewed as a legacy language, COBOL is still widely used in the business sector

Standards

• COBOL 85 supports local variables, recursion, dynamic memory allocation, and structured programming
• COBOL 2002 supports object-oriented programming, Unicode, XML, calls to and from other languages such as C, and (within framework environments such as J2EE and .NET) instantiating COBOL as EJBs

Compilers

COBOL IDE for Eclipse

• Licensed under the Eclipse Public License
  

OpenCOBOL

• A COBOL front-end for GCC
• Licensed under the GPL

COBOL for GCC

• A GNU project for adding a COBOL 85 compiler to GCC
• The project has been stalled in the pre-alpha stage since 2001, and as of 2005-07-17 is no longer in active development
• Licensed under the GPL

TinyCOBOL

• COBOL 85 compiler
• The project has been stalled in the pre-alpha stage since 2001
• Licensed under the GPL

Case sensitivity

• COBOL is case insensitive.