[waltman]

That 72-character limit came about because the most popular IBM punch card reader at the time COBOL was being written could only read 72 of the 80 characters on a card. Once you know that anything after column 72 will be ignored, you can repurpose those columns for other things. At my shop we used them to denote revision numbers. And once practices like that get set, you're pretty much stuck with the older formatting rules.

[dodders]

Yup. When I used RPG400 we'd use the first 4 columns for revision numbers as they were originally reserved on the punched cards but not used on the editor...