Welcome! In this lesson, we'll shift gears from arithmetic to another crucial aspect of COBOL programming: variable naming conventions. While arithmetic operations are vital for calculations, understanding how to name your variables properly will make your code more readable and maintainable. This ensures that others (and you in the future) can easily understand what your code is doing.

In this lesson, you'll learn about:

1. Importance of Descriptive Names: Why using meaningful variable names is essential.
2. Consistency in Naming: How consistency in variable naming improves readability.
3. Practical Examples: Illustrations with COBOL code to reinforce these best practices.

First, why is this important? Using clear and consistent variable names helps anyone reading your code understand its intent. This is especially critical in business applications, where clarity can prevent errors and improve collaboration among developers.

Let's look at some COBOL examples to illustrate good and bad naming practices:

Historical Note: COBOL originated in the 1960s and 70s, when keypunch machines only allowed programmers to write in uppercase letters. As a result, early COBOL code and variable names were always in uppercase. Nowadays, most modern COBOL compilers can interpret lowercase variable names as well. In this path, as we did in other units, we will often use lowercase for readability, but you may still see uppercase in many real-world COBOL programs.