retrocomputing

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Indiana bakery still using Commodore 64s originally released in 1982 as cash registers — Hilligoss Bakery in Brownsburg sticks to the BASICs (www.tomshardware.com)

submitted 1 day ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 19 hours ago

Yes. COBOL instructions map nearly directly (something like 1:4) to machine language instructions on the mainframe chipsets it was built for. It strongly encourages stateless procedures with its design, and has some other benefits that align closely with the financial sector. You can drop down to assembly as a hot spot optimization if you really need to.

The industry could replace COBOL, but its replacement would wind up looking a lot like COBOL at the code structure level, or a slightly nicer language would have an intermediate transpile step into COBOL or something similar. Probably no performance gains. Perhaps some usability gains. Not enough to sell it as a rewrite.

Reality is its use will probably outlive us all.