I won't argue the merits of COBOL. I stopped doing it for a living 35 years ago for a reason, but sort is not a good example. COBOL has generic SORT and MERGE f

I won't argue the merits of COBOL. I stopped doing it for a living 35 years ago for a reason, but sort is not a good example. COBOL has generic SORT and MERGE facilities built in as verbs. In an IBM environment (i.e. writing real applications) you'd be hard pressed to build something that has better performance than what's provided out of the box.