The separate sections for data definitions, forms, etc.

Ah, the 'divisions'. Right, I see what you mean. Quite a few languages have such 'divisions', though they're not usually explicit. For instance, C code usually has a bunch of include statements at the top, followed by internal structure declarations followed by function definitions.

We don't name the sections there but they might as well have names (you can include a file in the middle of another but that's pretty bad form). Other languages are more formal (for instance Modula-2, Erlang, Ada). That's not a COBOL specific thing.

Those are just simple examples. If the code grows you can always split up the sections into different modules.