That's a good point. The columns indeed are meaningful. But AFAIK (and after running a few simple scripts), it seems the indentation doesn't matter so much when you are in the program area. I just ran an "Until" statement and altered the indentation without changing the result. Perhaps this is just because I am tryin a newer version of COBOL (
https://tio.run/#cobol-gnu)?
I'll update the post mentioning COBOL (and likely Fortran too), as at least "column-oriented".