Vlad, Steve, and Jim,

All I can tell you folks that in early 1987, when I was going to school, we were using an ANSI standard COBOL that on the Cyber mainframe at Georgia Tech. And it was line oriented (with a line editor) and had the "features" I described previouisly. Certainly, it's not surprising that its changed quite a bit since then.

While later incarnations of the language may not have borne any resemblance to BASICA, the fact of the matter is that BASIC claims COBOL as one of its antecedents (does that explain some things?).

As a side note: Jim made the point regarding its readability. One of the comments the professor who taught my class made was that it (COBOL) was developed so that they could "take winos off the streets and make them programmers"? After a wrestling with it for a quarter, I found that statement both hilarious and frightening.

George