[KerrAvon]

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.

[pavlov]

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

[noizejoy]

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

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