I hear a great deal about the C programming language. Having written COBOL applications for more than 50 years, I've gained a deep appreciation for what COBOL was designed to do exceptionally well.
One interesting aspect of OpenCOBOL (GnuCOBOL) is that it translates COBOL source code into C during compilation, allowing COBOL programs to benefit from the portability and performance of C while preserving COBOL's business-oriented syntax.
Although C is an extremely powerful systems programming language, it does not provide built-in facilities for many of the business programming features that COBOL offers. Tasks such as sorting records, generating summary reports, handling fixed-format business data, and producing formatted reports are integral parts of COBOL but must be implemented through libraries or custom code in C. These capabilities are among the reasons COBOL has remained the language of choice for many large-scale business and financial applications for decades.