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Comment by martyheyman

9 hours ago

Mainframe COBOL to POSIX native machine language or Java is largely a solved problem. 40 year old code that hasn't been touched in 30 years "ain't broke" and likely doesn't need fixing IMHO. Our take is get it to POSIX/Java so you can sort out all the OTHER STUFF and then rewrite/re-architect at your leisure. {disclosure: we're the GCC COBOL team}.

> The challenge is the institutional knowledge that never made it into code or documentation and has walked out the door.

This is a problem a compiler cannot fix, and is a very real problem.