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COBOL Program Characteristics

An analysis of a COBOL benchmark (Iliffe, 1978) indicated that seven verbs accounted for 95% of executed statements, while the same seven accounted for almost 90% of stored statements. These verbs are MOVE, IF, GO TO, ADD, PERFORM, READ and WRITE, which can be grouped as follows:

Loop and I/O statements together cover 25% of execution time. Obviously within loops a large percentage of time is spent on memory accesses.



Rizos Sakellariou 2000-07-31