How this site is made
Who publishes COBOL Textbook, how the articles are made, and how the facts in them are checked.
Who publishes it
COBOL Textbook is published under its own name.
No article on COBOL Textbook is paid for by anyone it writes about.
Editor
C. B. Zakarian (a pen name) is the owner and editor of COBOL Textbook. C. B. Zakarian holds a Ph.D. in Information Systems, with a focus on data science, from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro (2016), and is an assistant professor.
C. B. Zakarian decides what COBOL Textbook publishes and when, and the figures on each page are checked against the sources it names before publication. Pages the editor has reviewed in full show the date of that review, and errors are corrected when they are found.
How the articles are made
The articles, code listings and datasets are produced from the sources named in each article, under the owner’s direction. The owner decides what is published and when.
Where an article reports its own research, saying what was read, what was run or what could not be confirmed, “we” means this site. No article describes anyone’s personal history or career. Until September 25, 2026 the About page said the site was written by one person; it was corrected that day.
How the numbers are checked
- Listings. Every lesson's program is desk-checked against the GnuCOBOL Programmer's Guide and the standard. GnuCOBOL 3.2 is now installed where the site is built: by 30 October 2026, 14 of the 23 lessons had been compiled and run with it, and their pages show the real output and say so. On 30 October 2026 every COBOL listing the site ships was also put through cobc under
-std=ibmand-std=mf; the MOVE and COMPUTE lessons publish what changed. The other 9 were written before the compiler was installed; their expected output was worked out by hand from the documented rules, their pages still say they have not been compiled, and they are being re-run and re-labelled one lesson at a time. - Python companions. Where a lesson quotes figures from a Python companion script (test data, a copybook parser, a column checker), that script was run, and the lesson says which figures came from it.
- Sources. Behaviour specific to IBM Enterprise COBOL is cited to IBM's documentation, and GnuCOBOL behaviour to its Programmer's Guide, NEWS file or test suite. Where the documents disagree or say nothing, the lesson says so.
If a fact cannot be verified, it is left out and the article says so. When an article is corrected, its updated date moves with the change.
Advertising and contact
COBOL Textbook shows no advertising today. It may carry display advertising through Google AdSense later, and the privacy policy describes how that would work. There are no affiliate links and no sponsored articles. Corrections and questions go to contact@coboltextbook.com.