I think this is a reference to an old joke about "God is Real, unless declared as Integer" since in Pascal Real and Integer are data types.

The joke is actually about FORTRAN, where variables don't have to be declared, and is implicitly declared as Integer if it's first letter is in the range I-N and otherwise implicitly declared as the type Real (usually 32-bit floating point). Thus the variable GOD will implicitly be of type real.

Pascal have the same type names, but does not allow implicit declarations.

Oh, interesting. I suspected it might be from an older language, but i expected Algol, not FORTRAN :-P.

Personally i associate it with Pascal because i first saw it on an IRC channel's topic back in the mid-90s :-).

If it's a stupid programming joke, you can probably blame it on FORTRAN. COBOL programmers don't have senses of humor.