WATBOL is a teaching compiler for the COBOL programming language developed in 1969 at the University of Waterloo.
Since programs written by undergraduate students were unlikely to be run more than a few times, after they were successfully written and debugged, the efficiency of the program, once compiled was of secondary importance, compared with giving simpler, clearer error messages, and in simplifying the steps for the student to compile the program.
At that time executing a program through the use of commercial compiler was a three-step process.
WATFOR and WATBOL allowed simple programs to be compiled, linked, and executed in a single step.
In 1982 Carol Vogt wrote that 230 other institutions were using WATBOL.