That is a terrible idea from someone who doesn't know COBOL. Programs in COBOL mostly don't need pointers and offer better type safety than C. They often used

That is a terrible idea from someone who doesn't know COBOL. Programs in COBOL mostly don't need pointers and offer better type safety than C. They often used nested structures of records, which are a pain to represent in C. Language is also stricter when it comes to modularity. Rewriting in C would make most COBOL programs worse. Also, floating-point is really not the issue. What you in fact want, on the IBM Mainframe at least, is to move to hardware decimal floating-point (latest IEEE 754), which is way faster than IBM's packed decimal (fixed-point) system commonly used in COBOL. Finally, legacy COBOL systems either have or not have bugs which cause certain edge-case behavior and this is really hard to reproduce in another system.