Don't laugh cablegod, let me tell you the real story!
One system I work with is 7 million lines of COBOL code. We were given a charter to web-enable it, and open it up for B2B data interchange. Meeps like you recommended recoding it into C++, or god forbid, Java, but the history of such endeavors is one of utter failure, not to mention ROM expected cost was close to a billion dollars. So, we are using servlets and EJB's that call API's coded in COBOL, Assembler, and RPG. I was looking at a particular database interface program written in assembler just recently... It was originally written in 1968. Lol! Now there is code reuse! It was written a year before I was born. Anyways, we are successfully closing this project soon, at less than a mil for the three month endeavor...
Luckily, I don't code in COBOL, most of my stuff is in Java, Net.Data, SQL, and Rexx. I stopped doing C when I moved to the "e" paradigm back in 1997. And I work almost exclusively on IBM platforms.