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I was under the impression that COBOL's English syntax was intended to be a more human-readable approach, not so much a workaround for character set limitations.

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Maybe both? COBOL predates the first draft of ASCII by several years. Character sets were far from standardized in those days.

Lots (most?) of classic COBOL used EBCDIC[0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EBCDIC

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