I worked for one of those companies using COBOL. This strikes me: > Once I discovered what the problem was, the fix was easy: I deleted one character of white space from the beginning of line 19, which put the period at column 72. Although I'd never encountered it before, this was such a common bug that many mainframe COBOL programmers would tape a piece of thread between columns 72 and 73 on their terminals. Why would you want a compiler/language that allows you to shoot yourself in the foot for 1 misplaced character in the source file, without raising an error instead of blindly executing the code? Like you said, it can change completely the logic of the code so it could be disastrous and go unseen, especially in business transactions? I know things changed recently. But I would be very surprised if the company I worked updated their COBOL version.