I agree with your analogy, it's pretty much like what Perl 6 is going to be to Perl 5. But you can't complain about it when words like `backward compatibility' do not appear in the upgrade manual. What if all these COBOL statements had been kept, but would have instead run much slower, because on the new COBOL version their meaning had extended and many new checks were necessary?
Or worse, as in this case, the old code touched a bug which made things run too fast, leading to unrealistically high speed expectations from the developer (and indirectly the management). I used the IBM example because they would have taken care of the following: they would've not fixed a bug whose fixing would seriously slow down all previous code (without making a big thing about it and write self-healing code) and they would've not let their product be mutilated by any redistributor.
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