COBOL-Its relationship with other American national standards

The standards which interface with COBOL can effect the degree of machine independence a COBOL program has. COBOL 74 provides the capability to process the standard coded character set defined by the American National Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII). 2 In that' regard, COBOL 74 relies on the ASCII Standard for defining the character codes and the collating sequence that are to be reflected by the program when processing that particular character code. Additionally, COBOL can specify that ASCII be recorded on external media such as punch cards or magnetic tape 4 with magnetic tape labels. 5 If that data is to be used for information interchange, then the recording of the data should be in accordance with the respective media standards. The American National Standards which· interface with COBOL must be properly defined and implemented on a computer system for a COBOL program to be independent of the computer system. In the process of validating COBOL compilers, we use these other American National Standards related to COBOL and have found that data cannot be eaSIly transported between computer systems.