[pdw]

Another fascinating aspect of COBOL is that it's the one programming language that actively rejected ALGOL influence. There are no functions or procedures, no concept of local variables. In general, no feature for abstraction at all, other than labelled statements. Block-structured control flow (conditionals and loops) was only added in the late 80s.

[skissane]

Contemporary COBOL (the most recent ISO standard is from 2023) has all those things and more.

Rather than rejecting such features, COBOL was just slower to adopt them-because conservatism and inertia and its use in legacy systems. But there are 20+ year old COBOL compilers that support full OO (classes, methods, inheritance, etc)