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> There's nothing wrong with COBOL either its been running for decades doing boring but essential things like payroll and taxes.

IIRC, some extremely core IRS systems are actually written in IBM 360 Assembly. A few years back, there was a project to develop an automated translator to convert that code to Java, but the project failed. The lead engineer was hired on some special authorization to get around government salary limits, but that authorization couldn't be renewed before the project was done.

I don't remember the specifics, but I recall reading there's an actual IBM 7000 series mainframe still in government service. It has some kind of wrapper implemented to allow it to be called by more modern systems.

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> I don't remember the specifics, but I recall reading there's an actual IBM 7000 series mainframe still in government service. It has some kind of wrapper implemented to allow it to be called by more modern systems.

My understanding is some US government agency still has some apps written in 7074 assembly language. But it doesn't have a physical 7074 series mainframe, it uses a 7074 emulator which runs under z/OS on modern System z hardware.

That 7074 emulator isn't some secret sauce, it is actually just a very old IBM product. When IBM released the S/360 in the 1960s, they also released a 7074 emulator to help customers port their apps from 7074 to S/360. And this US government agency used that emulator to port some of their 7074 apps to S/360, and are still running the emulator on modern z/OS. It is probably no longer officially supported by IBM, but due to z/OS's excellent backward compatibility it still runs.

(The idea that the US government still has a physical 7074, as opposed to just an emulator for it, is in part due to US government employees who have spoken about this topic publicly being deliberately vague due to "security reasons".)

>IIRC, some extremely core IRS systems are actually written in IBM 360 Assembly.

Yeah, this language is called PL/X and its specifically not for use outside the company. Its a language between Assembly and C and gives the programmer a huge amount of control over the hardware.

Going from PL/X to Java won't work as well as the JVM runtime has overheads that might not be acceptable for 31bit zSeries with its 2gb address space. Also compared to PL/X you're giving up a huge amount of control.

Are you confusing IBM and IRS here? PL/X is an internal language used by IBM. To the best of my knowledge, the IRS don't directly use it.

(There was a brief period, I think early 2000s, IBM let members of its partner program order IBM's PL/X compiler for a small fee. They withdrew that later but some ISVs did get their hands on it while that policy was in place. I think it is actually still sometimes available to ISVs if they pay $$$ and sign an NDA.)

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