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posted by martyb on Monday September 16 2019, @01:48PM   Printer-friendly
from the COBOL-is-often-fractionally-better dept.

https://medium.com/@bellmar/is-cobol-holding-you-hostage-with-math-5498c0eb428b

Face it: nobody likes fractions, not even computers.

When we talk about COBOL the first question on everyone's mind is always Why are we still using it in so many critical places? Banks are still running COBOL, close to 7% of the GDP is dependent on COBOL in the form of payments from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, The IRS famously still uses COBOL, airlines still use COBOL (Adam Fletcher dropped my favorite fun fact on this topic in his Systems We Love talk: the reservation number on your ticket used to be just a pointer), lots of critical infrastructure both in the private and public sector still runs on COBOL.

Why?

The traditional answer is deeply cynical. Organizations are lazy, incompetent, stupid. They are cheap: unwilling to invest the money needed upfront to rewrite the whole system in something modern. Overall we assume that the reason so much of civil society runs on COBOL is a combination of inertia and shortsightedness. And certainly there is a little truth there. Rewriting a mass of spaghetti code is no small task. It is expensive. It is difficult. And if the existing software seems to be working fine there might be little incentive to invest in the project.

But back when I was working with the IRS the old COBOL developers used to tell me: "We tried to rewrite the code in Java and Java couldn't do the calculations right."

[Ed note: The referenced article is extremely readable and clearly explains the differences between floating-point and fixed-point math, as well as providing an example and explanation that clearly shows the tradeoffs.]


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 16 2019, @02:55PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 16 2019, @02:55PM (#894617)

    Finally some one gets it!!!

    COBOL
    RPG (assembler in drag)
    IBM ASM

    ALL are powerful languages for bulk processing ng. All from the day that 1400 machines were running the world. COBOL was the “first” write once and run on anything. RPG was a direct replacement of 1403 back-a-lack boards and 4k core that ran the I/O cycle and set flags IBM ASM move 16kB in a single “click” tick.

    ACH transfers are card decks. Amounts are not 2.31e+10. Real processing take really machines. IBM understood business. The rest are Sciences that make data gathering devices.

    Kids today?