Theoretically possible to program statistical animation in Micro Focus COBOL?

Of course it's theoretically possible. COBOL is a Turing-complete language, and MF COBOL can call entry points using the standard ABIs on the platforms it's supported on; so it can 1) compute any function computable in C , and 2) use platform facilities such as graphical output.

That said, drawing graphics using the low-level GUI APIs is tiresome - I did quite a bit of it, many years ago. Since you're using VC for Visual Studio, we know you're on Windows; that means you have various choices for drawing graphics. The classical Windows graphics APIs are GDI and GDI . These days developers are more likely to use Direct2D and Direct3D, but those are overkill for something like this.

In general, if someone wanted to know how to do low-level graphics output on Windows, I'd refer them to the Microsoft GDI documentation (see for example the reference for the Polygon function in MSDN) and a graphics textbook such as Foley (though there seem to be a lot of Open Courseware graphics texts available free online these days). But I'm not sure anyone needs a textbook to draw a handful of rectangles and triangles.

So if you really want to do this, I suggest trying to write a COBOL program that opens a window and draws something simple in it - just a rectangle or something. If you can do that, you're well on the way.