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What else it is going to do is keep looping until the end of the input file is reached, which was the programming model at the time.

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There you go. Is that something all COBOL programs do, loop back to the start? Did other programming languages do this?

I know RPG did that. I can't tell you if all programs do that, probably not today, but that was the origin. Keep in mind that at the time, all your data was on tape, punch cards or disk, you only had a few kb of RAM.

IBM still churns out new releases of the programming language, where they keep tacking on support for all the things programmers of today want to do.

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