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by IainIreland 1643 days ago
I spent ~5 years working on a COBOL compiler. In practice, production COBOL compilers pick and choose which parts of the standard they choose to implement based on customer demand, and there's not a lot of demand for most of the new stuff. To a first approximation, almost all COBOL code is legacy code in maintenance mode, and I would guess that a significant fraction of COBOL running today has barely been touched since the 90s, if not earlier.