Besides the required PROGRAM-ID paragraph in the IDENTIFICATION
DIVISION, the initial versions of COBOL supported several optional
paragraphs, namely AUTHOR, INSTALLATION, DATE-WRITTEN, DATE-COMPILED,
SECURITY, and REMARKS. With the exception of the REMARKS paragraph
which has since been dropped from ANSI COBOL in favor of comment
lines (although it is still used by some programmers), the remaining
paragraphs are still generally coded and are often subject to
various installation standards on their use. All of them, with
the exception of the DATE-COMPILED paragraph can easily be replaced
with additional comment entries at the beginning of the program.
In general, most of these entries are valuable for the maintenance
programmer and applicable installation standards should be followed.
However, they should be coded as comment lines rather than paragraphs
to be compatible with future releases of COBOL.
The exception is the DATE-COMPILED paragraph. Since most
compilers replace whatever follows this paragraph with the current
date, and the date (and also the current time) is also printed
on the top of each page of the listing, this entry is now superfluous.
[Note that all these additional paragraphs are labeled "obsolete"
in COBOL-85 and are subject to being deleted in future releases.]
RULE 3 - Omit the DATE-COMPILED paragraph from the program.
Replace other IDENTIFICATION DIVISION paragraphs with appropriate
comments.