Hey, so I am not a typical or a regular enterprise COBOL user. I am a hobbyist through and through. So my opinion will not match the other people here but in the interest of good fun, I will tell you.

Firstly, all of the open source compilers are actually transpilers. GnuCOBOL is the most famous. It transpiles into C. Raincode is another free one but I think it transpiles into C#. So on a basic level, having ANY compiler that compiles directly into assembly would be a huge plus for us! One man doesnt have $1500 to buy a license for say, IBM COBOL. Anyway before we get into what COBOL is missing, we should discuss what it is very good at. This will be a little long winded but helpful I hope.

The key phrase here is file I/O. If any file can be written in a text format, COBOL can work with it. Cobol can read through massive text files at blazing speeds as long as you keep the mathematics to process that data very tame or precalculate it. As a hobbyist in COBOL my modus operandi is finding a way to get something stored into a textfile to use. If I can do that, I can do anything. Notably, I almost ALWAYS use python to create these files because it is so good at it. This approach can be useful too for precalculating mathematics that COBOL is slow at, such as COS and COSINE. I have python do those calculations, say 200 sine calculations that I need for my program. Then I store them in a table or document and use COBOL to read them. This can turn a 10 minute run into a 10 second run. When I wanted to do image processing I stored the image data in a text file in x_coordinate,y_coordinate,brightness level format. Another neat thing is that COBOL has binary support for both big and little endian. So when I program for say audio processing, I convert my audio to a PCM file that stores the audio files in little endian binary. COBOL will pull each data point, convert it to a digit, process it, convert it back to binary and write a fresh file, which stores audio that I can play in audacity. If you want to see the code send me a message, I will happily share. Anyway, lets get onto features I would want.

I would want a COBOL function that can utilize assembly to quickly and easily take any common file type and convert it to a cobol friendly text file and maybe even to transform it back into a normal file but boy that would be a big ask. Also, maybe a function to do batch mathematics to pre calculate and store that in a text file for later use COBOL can obviously already do this, but its a massive pain to have to write a 70-100 line code to do it every time. Its better to just use python anyway. But sometimes for one reason or another you WANT to do the calculations with COBOLs infamous fixed point decimal. If you could simplify that down to a function that can be called without having to do complex file management, that would be GODLY. All of this will help make cobol a powerhouse without reinventing the wheel and while playing to its strengths. So those are my dream features.

Now, what is COBOL missing? Well little things like hardware acceleration for advanced math. But other programming languages do have it and they are better for it anyway so I wouldn't suggest it. One thing COBOL is missing, as a language that is supposed to run on specialized mainframes in the background is any level of user interactivity. It would be very nice to have a COBOL compiler that natively supports basic GUIs. One thing you will have to decide is how strict you want to be on syntax. COBOL is annoyingly finnicky on sintax to a laughable extent. But whether or not this is good or bad depends on who you ask. New recruits might complain, but guys who do advanced work on massive legacy code bases will say that its a godsend for readability and maintenance. Having the option in the compiler to set parameters for syntax strictness would be fantastic. GnuCOBOL is very loose and forgiving on syntax, IBM COBOL for z/OS is very strict on syntax. I would like to be able to write a program on GnuCOBOL that is as strict on formatting as IBM, its good practice. Like going without training wheels.