COMTRAN

COMTRAN (COMmercial TRANslator) is an early programming language developed at IBM.

Developed by Bob Bemer, in 1957, the language was the first to feature the programming language element known as a picture clause.

Several elements of COMTRAN were incorporated into COBOL: A picture clause element defines how a particular data item should be formatted, for output.

It is similar to the FORTRAN format specifier seen in the READ and WRITE statements, or the formatting strings seen in more modern languages like C. This became an important part of COBOL.

This is a sample COMTRAN program, doing payroll calculations.