The other problems with porting the code to some other language (like C++): 1. Introduction of errors (both overt and subtle) 2. Fixing of what seem to be iss

The other problems with porting the code to some other language (like C++): 1. Introduction of errors (both overt and subtle) 2. Fixing of what seem to be issues in the original code that are actually undocumented workarounds (or similar things) to potential bugs (in COBOL or who-knows-what-else-in-the-codebase) Both are big issues in such a move; software engineers don't often appreciate that much of this old stuff is still around because it WORKS. It has been virtually fully debugged, just through the iteration of time and experience. So porting can easily introduce bugs that may not be apparent immediately; and because software engineers are always wanting to make thing better, if they are working with the COBOL codebase and see something that they think could be done "better" - that change might actually cause problems down the road, perhaps in ways that aren't recognized immediately, or only in edge cases - things that were worked around decades ago in the COBOL implementation.