Cobol under control
Henry Ledgard, William Cave · Communications of the ACM · 1976
A sample set of Cobol programming standards is offered. These standards constrain code to be developed in a “structured” form for both data and control structures. They do not require syntax beyond the existing Cobol language and in fact utilize a typical limited subset of the 1974 ANS Cobol standard. These standards have proved extremely valuable in practice and have reduced the cost and time to produce and maintain large software systems that have been deployed in live multiple customer environments.