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.]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 16 2019, @06:43PM
Regarding specifying stuff, "Customers/users don't really know what they want" is not a Software Engineering problem but is a common major problem.
Copying an existing complicated building from scratch so that it works EXACTLY the same (bugs, squeaks, defects and all) isn't that easy either. Is that a fault of Civil Engineering?
Copying an existing complicated building from scratch MINUS the "unwanted" bugs and "defects" while keeping some "wanted bugs" is harder (especially if the Client and end users haven't fully figured out what is unwanted and what is wanted). Is that a fault of Civil Engineering?
See also:
https://soylentnews.org/comments.pl?noupdate=1&sid=10481&cid=260038#commentwrap [soylentnews.org]
https://soylentnews.org/comments.pl?noupdate=1&sid=1603&cid=38521#commentwrap [soylentnews.org]