COBOL Programming Standards

The author of this document has over a decade's worth of experience in writing COBOL programs, and has encountered many different standards, each with its own set of strong as well as weak points. Some are too rigid and unnecessarily restrictive, while others are too flexible and open to misinterpretation.

Those which do not encourage or promote efficient, readable and maintainable code have been discarded, and the remainder have been reviewed and modified in the light of experience, common sense and logic.

It presents real-world solutions to the key programming problems facing COBOL programmers today. These solutions will be presented in a topic-by-topic method that will allow the reader to skip around the book to find the solutions key to them, without having to read the entire book from start to finish.