There are several different versions of COBOL . Near the end of the twentieth century the year 2000 problem was the focus of significant COBOL programming effort , sometimes by the same programmers who had designed the systems decades before . The particular level of effort required for COBOL code has been attributed both to the large amount of business-oriented COBOL , as COBOL is by design a business language and business applications use dates heavily , and to constructs of the COBOL language such as the PICTURE clause , which can be used to define fixed-length numeric fields , including two-digit fields for years .