ILE COBOL is designed to support Standard COBOL.
Standard COBOL refers to the COBOL programming language as defined in the document entitled American National Standard for Information Systems - Programming Language - COBOL.
The COBOL language is maintained by the ANSI Technical Committee X3J4.
COBOL (an acronym for "common business-oriented language") is a compiled English-like computer programming language designed for business use. It is an imperative, procedural and, since 2002, object-oriented language.