>I seem to remember that for every cobol table there is a related file with the description of the structure. This file has the same name, but a different extension. But I may be wrong...!

Not necessarily right, and not necessarily wrong. It was just a matter of good practice to have table structures in sort of #include files - but then these were parts of the source and not necessary at runtime.

Unless something drastically changed, and if this Acu cobol wasn't vastly different from others that I've met (which were, let's see, CP/M Cobol by, surprise, an obscure company at the time called Microsoft; PDP Cobol and Vax Cobol by DEC and then I did convert tables from MicroFocus Cobol apps, but I never saw much of the source), the table structure is inside the executable. Without it, it's just a heap of bytes, unless there's a record management system of some sort - which on PDP and VAX was an OS service. On PCs, however, I think there's no such thing for most of the flavors of Cobol.