Comment by theoldgit

That was always it's strength. I started programming in 1976, trained in COBOL and ICL PLAN, used punched cards, and mop terminals once we got out of training. 100% of our programs were batch programs. There was a huge bias towards readability, so that anyone of us could read the source code and understand it. That readability was offset somewhat by the necessity to read and understand the core dumps produced when a program failed. At best you would be able to trace a failure to a specific line of code. Thus the habit of dry running programs was hard wired into you. When I left the government institution to move into commercial programming,it was still COBOL and batch programs until the early 80s.I spent 3 years on overnight support and that was when COBOL proved it's worth, you could pick up any previously unseen listing and the core dump and usually fix it pretty quickly, caveat it was always a tactical fix.