Historically, COBOL has been case-insensitive which makes interoperation with .NET methods more difficult than it should be. For example, method or member names had to be enclosed within quotation marks and declare synonyms to refer to external types. With Visual COBOL these restrictions have been removed and the code is more “.NET-like” while still retaining COBOL’s traditional ease of understanding. Unnecessary COBOL elements such as “repository” have been made optional which greatly reduces the size and complexity of a COBOL .NET program. The language changes improve readability and simplify the learning process for existing C# or VB programmers who can easily work on the COBOL code. With this flexibility, teams can be more agile and thus reduce development and maintenance costs.