To answer the reserved-word question first, you must learn to
misspell. For example instead of date use the word ddate or my-date. If
you want to do OO IMO you are better served by using a language built on
that format from the beginning. There are lots of them. In the words of
Lt. Cdr Grace Murray Hopper (I am quoting from memory) "I don't ask
COBOL to do the work of FORTRAN or FORTRAN to do the work of COBOL."
She said this long before we had Python or Ruby or whatever.
Open Source COBOL is built to the COBOL-85 standard with some bits and
pieces of the COBOL-2002 standard added. But all of Open Source COBOL is
per one standard or the other. This differs from most commercial
compilers which have nonstandard extensions for gui screen handling
etc.
The powers that be that build the COBOL standard keep trying to do what
you are trying to do--turn COBOL into something that competes with OO
languages. This is IMO a foolish endeavor bound to fail. There is
enough functionality to do most business tasks already in COBOL-85.
I say most because I have just asked for a workaround to go from julian
to year-month-day calendar date format. Open COBOL (and presumably the
standard) provides a half dozen function routines for dates but none
that do what I am looking for, alone or in combination. I may have to
write an ugly sub-program to do it. But it will be pure COBOL according
to the standard of course.