Could you give examples of this? From what I have seen COBOL is so insanely verbose that it becomes hard to read just trivial calculations.

They don’t use normal mathematical notation. Reading math as an English essay is not user friendly.

The idea that code becomes easier to read if it looks as much like natural language as possible is an idea I firmly reject. If Natural language was great at expressing calculations we would not be using mathematical notation at all.

Almost any complex topic explained will use natural language together with illustrations, pictures and special notation.