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:

Note that in the other units, we didn't use the conventions described above, since from the language learning perspective, it is not that important, and we want you to learn all different ways of writing code. But in the real world, it is crucial to follow these conventions.