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It doesn't sound too off to me - I can believe that there are a million legacy COBOL users around and that each writes on average a thousand lines of maintenance code each year. Or maybe fewer users and more lines - COBOL is a notoriously verbose language.

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I'm the author of the article, and I linked to the source of those numbers. The numbers seem reasonable to me too for the same reasons dcminter gave. One other reason is COBOL is a language that lends itself to copying and pasting old code instead of writing subroutines, so that leads to a lot of lines of code.

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