conversion to cobol

Answer 1

There is bit-level manipulation in some implementations of cobol. Check if you can use for a 1 byte working-storage variable PIC 1(8) for a variable [or PIC 1(6) for some hardware] or to access individual bits it could be PIC 1 OCCURS 8 TIMES and sometimes you have to include an entry in SPECIAL-NAMES section to inform the compiler that bit level access is required. First bit could be a sign bit for a full 4-byte word - PIC S1(31)  or PIC S1(23) as examples