While COBOL was initially used on mainframes and systems that could be considered 8-bit in some contexts,?it's not inherently an 8-bit system language?and is now used on diverse operating systems, including 64-bit ones.?
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Here's a more detailed explanation:
COBOL's Origins:
COBOL (Common Business-Oriented Language) was designed for business applications and was one of the first popular languages designed to be operating system-agnostic.?
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Early Systems:
In its early days, COBOL was used on mainframes and systems that might have used 8-bit character encoding, but the language itself wasn't tied to any specific bit architecture.?
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Modern COBOL:
Today, COBOL is used on a wide variety of systems, including 64-bit platforms and operating systems like z/OS, z/VSE, VME, Unix, NonStop OS, OpenVMS, and Windows.?
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IBM COBOL for Linux:
IBM provides a COBOL compiler for Linux on x86 that runs on 64-bit Linux distributions