[marktangotango]

Cobol and some of the Basics had a characteristics that made them very desirable for certain use cases. Namely, static memory allocation. Although you can dynamically allocate memory in Cobol, you generaly don't. All storage is statically allocated at program startup. This would be highly desirable if you wanted to allow third parties to execute arbitrary code on your server. That plus no recursive function calls ensures stack and heap safety.