The Pentagon's Seven Million Lines of Cobol

MrMetlHed writes "A portion of this Reuters article about the Pentagon's inability to manage paying soldiers properly mentions that their payroll program has 'seven million lines of Cobol code that hasn't been updated.' It goes on to mention that the documentation has been lost, and no one really knows how to update it well. In trying to replace the program, the Pentagon spent a billion dollars and wasn't successful."

Cobol is self-documenting

[mveloso]

But - but - cobol is supposed to be self-documenting!

Re:Cobol is self-documenting

[Anonymous Coward]

But - but - cobol is supposed to be self-documenting!

TL;DR

Can't read the article

[Anonymous Coward]

I tried to read the article, but it was written in English - a decades-old language.

Re:Redundant

[Nerdfest]

Also, seven million lines of COBOL is about what it takes to write a Sudoku solver in COBOL.

Re:Cobol is self-documenting

[plover]

The claim that the documentation "vanished" seems bogus. Far more likely in my opinion that it never existed in the first place, or that at some point they fired everyone, and thus broke the chain of custody.

I think the truth is probably much simpler than that. Someone dropped the card deck containing the documentation, and they never managed to sort it back into the right order.

Re:COBOL is self-documenting

[ebno-10db]

Yes, but every line is documented the same way, "don't touch this because I don't know what it does but sometimes it works".

Re:Cobol is self-documenting

[Anonymous Coward]

Seven million lines of COBOL might only be a short sorting routine.

Re: Cobol is self-documenting

[Mabhatter]

Those tapes got wiped when the magnetic alien was stored too close.

Re:Cobol is self-documenting

[Anne Thwacks]

Have you seen Cobol? It takes several hundred lines to write a "Hello World" program. 7 million lines of Cobol can probably be replaced by 70 lines of Perl (at the expense of any possibility of anyone ever reading it).