[schoen]

> I have made 3 changes here, which might or might not work with COBOL (I am Cobol ignorant ;) ).

I've never used COBOL before, but this thread and your post made me curious and I installed GNU Cobol and found a sample program that demonstrates a few language features.

After playing around with it a little, I think I've understood that "OF" is like a struct element (or object property) accessor, the parens are an array index, and the hyphen is a syntactically significant part of the identifier. "BY" is apparently a mandatory part of the multiplication operator.

Conclusion: each of your three changes (while, as you said, perfectly reasonable from the English language point of view) would indeed break the COBOL code!

By the way, I remember this being a bit of an issue when I tried programming in HyperTalk: on occasion I would unintentionally come up with an English synonym for some natural-language HyperTalk code, and it wouldn't be valid HyperTalk.

[JohnL4]

The existence of Gnu COBOL:

[schoen]

Furthermore, vim turned out to have a built-in COBOL syntax highlighting mode which was activated when I opened the source first!