pdanes (2/22/2013)[ There are plenty of tasks that need attention, without inventing silly make-work like replacing fully functional existing code.
Absolutely agree! If it works, requires no maintenance, and you are not moving platforms, leave it alone. We have some COBOL programs that have been running daily for over 12 years with no maintenance done to them. That's not common, but it does exist.
Back in the day, I wrote my share of COBOL on mainframes and AS/400. AS/400 even had (has?) embedded SQL that you can get some benefit of set based operations, but many people would still write it as a cursor so the procedural flow was still the same.