[flohofwoe]

IMHO a more realistic idea is to treat the COBOL code as the "idea" or "essence" of the shrine which eternally remains the same, and only rebuild the "physical presence" of the shrine, which would be the environment the COBOL code runs in (e.g. modernize the hardware, the operating system, the debugging/development tools and virtual environment (== emulator) the COBOL code runs in, but don't rewrite the COBOL code itself).

[rowanG077]

But then you have solved nothing...

[flohofwoe]

Maybe, but "nothing" is still much better than making things worse (first, a rewrite usually needs to be bug-by-bug compatible, so you have almost no leeway to "improve" the product, second, new code has new bugs that need to be found and fixed, don't underestimate the amount of work that has gone into a 50 years old code base that still does its job).