Reading through some of the questions here, the general concensus seems to be that there to continues to be an enourmous amount of COBOL code "out there", not just because it's a nightmare to refactor or re-code, but simply because for a certain market segment (financials etc.), it has proven itself to be more than capable of holding its own. But what **is** it about the language that causes it to be so? How can something that is several decades old continue to perform well enough to hold its own against more modern languages, with all the comensurate improvements in memory management etc.? Have the COBOL compilers etc. simply improved silently in the background? Or is there something inherent in the language that means it is extremely efficient for a given set of operations?