You keep making the COBOL to PASCAL connection, but to me that implies that you don't understand their design goals. The entire ALGOL-W, Pascal, Modula(-II), Oberon, Oberon-07 chain of Wirth languages was decades of striving for a minimalism in design that is entirely different from languages like COBOL and certainly have nothing to do with "program as a natural language sentence". The Wirth languages doesn't shy away from using English keywords, but when you look at their grammar, what stands out is how they focus on simplicity, not approaching natural language.

Wirth-ian languages is about languages as engineering. They're precise and pragmatic - e.g. constructs were stripped out if Wirth did not feel he could translate them into assembly in a compact and simple and easily understandable manner; he put restrictions on adding improvements to the compiler that didn't "pay for themselves" etc. The entire toolchains and systems and languages he worked on is focused on this.