> But while Pascal has a "PROGRAM" statement, most BASIC dialects (including Microsoft's) don't. COBOL doesn't have a "PROGRAM" statement either, although it do

> But while Pascal has a "PROGRAM" statement, most BASIC dialects (including Microsoft's) don't. COBOL doesn't have a "PROGRAM" statement either, although it does have an "EXIT PROGRAM" statement. It was PROGRAM-ID in COBOL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COBOL#Hello,_world https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COBOL#Hello,_world > Here's a software manual from 1993 – https://books.google.com/books?id=jAqUEgrLBa8C&pg=PA14 https://books.google.com/books?id=jAqUEgrLBa8C&pg=PA14 – you can see on that page the application is divided into a number of executables – "the core TS.EXE program" and a number of "General support utilities", one of which ("PRINTPCX.EXE") is described as "A program to print graphs". Although the other executables are not explicitly called "programs", it seems clear to me that "program" and "executable" are synonymous in the usage of the manual's authors. That's a utility and I'd already said "utilities" were a classification of programs. The GPs point wasn't about utilities though. > That is admittedly an application for MS-DOS, not Windows. But I don't believe there were any great differences in terminology in this area between MS-DOS and Windows. Anecdotally I remember all executables being talked about as "programs" in the DOS era -- which might also be a throwback to when all software was written as a complete program and all executables were commands (eg pre-dynamically linked libraries so shared libraries would either have to be their own command or compiled into the each executable). But in fairness, terms like "program", "utility", "application" were, to some extent, rather fuzzy descriptions back then anyway. At least in the context of what we're describing anyway.