On Sat, 14 Mar 2020 01:08:21 -0000 (UTC), Martin Gregorie
 declaimed the following:


>That's useful, but I suspect it is an IBM-specific feature because its
>not mentioned in either of my COBOL books, which were published in 1983
>"A COBOL Handbook (Christopher Russell) and 1985 "The Illustrated RM
>COBOL Book" (Deborah Stone) and both describe ANSI 74 COBOL.
>
 Probably... I don't recall it from my college (Xerox Sigma 6,
COBOL-74), and haven't seen it in either of "Mastering COBOL: Year 2000 and
Other Legacy Code Solutions" (Carol Baroudi; 1999 Sybex) or "COBOL From
Micro to Mainframe: Preparing for the New Millenium 3rd ed"
(Grauer/Villar/Buss; 2000 Prentice Hall) *

>I see from the above IBM reference that mixed case (and all lower case?)
>is now accepted in COBOL source code. When was that standardised. Asking
>because I haven't written standards-compliant COBOL since 1984, apart
>from a little distinctly non-standard Tandem S-COBOL.
>

 Not sure about lower case, but COBOL-2002, as I recall, introduced
"free-form" source -- no longer requiring top-level statements start in
8-11, and sublevels to start in 12+





* Both texts included a version of Fujitsu COBOL v4 (Compiler, IDE, support
for Visual BASIC, preliminary OO features, and a capability for COBOL
applications with GUIs [PowerCOBOL] -- but did not include a distributable
run-time library)... Unfortunately, it won't install on anything newer than
W98.


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