COBOL (common business oriented language) is a prominent computer language designed specifically for commercial uses, created in 1960 by a team drawn from several computer makers and the Pentagon. The best-known individual associated with COBOL was then-Lieutenant Grace Murray Hopper who made fundamental contributions to the U.S. Navy’s standardization of COBOL. COBOL excels at the most common kinds of data processing for business—simple arithmetic operations performed on huge files of data. The language endures because its syntax is very much like English and because a program written in COBOL for one kind of computer can run on many others without alteration.