In his popular textbook A Simplified Guide to Structured COBOL Programming, Daniel D. McCracken tries to make the treatment general for any machine and compiler, but when he gives details for a particular one, they are to the IBM COBOL compiler and for a System/370.

[1] Similarly, another popular textbook of the time, Stern and Stern's Structured COBOL Programming, tries to present an implementation-independent explanation of the language, but the appendix giving the full syntax of the language is explicitly for IBM COBOL, with its extensions to the language highlighted.

[2] Use of IBM COBOL was so widespread that Capex Corporation, an independent software vendor, made a post-code generation phase object code optimizer for it.

The current IBM COBOL compiler family consists of the following products:[5]

(Year-Month-Day) (Year-Month-Day) Check the lifecycle details (lifecycle dates, announcement letters, and other information) for Enterprise COBOL for z/OS products.