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What was COBOL's syntax first described in?
Nowadays, it's very common to use BNF (or extensions thereof) to describe the syntaxes of various programming languages or their constructs. What was the situation like 60+ years ago? COBOL and BNF seemed to appear concurrently in 1959, and it seems obvious that CODASYL would not use BNF (or even know of it), but in all my searches I couldn't actually find the initial design notes or the first adopted syntax description for COBOL 60: what did they use to describe its first syntax? Was it really just plain textual wrangling, or did they have a separate formal notation system that's since fallen out of use?
Nowadays, it's very common to use BNF (or extensions thereof) to describe the syntaxes of various programming languages or their constructs. What was the situation like 60+ years ago? COBOL and BNF seemed to appear concurrently in 1959, and it seems obvious that CODASYL would not use BNF (or even know of it), but in all my searches I couldn't actually find the initial design notes or the first adopted syntax description for COBOL 60: what did they use to describe its first syntax? Was it really just plain textual wrangling, or did they have a separate formal notation system that's since fallen out of use?
