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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: 5, Informative) by sjames on Monday September 16 2019, @07:22PM (1 child)

    by sjames (2882) on Monday September 16 2019, @07:22PM (#894771) Journal

    The author made a fair point that the industry frequently bills Java as COBOL's natural successor, so it is perfectly fair to compare the two to see why that may not be such a good idea and why it hasn't been all that successful so far.

    TLDR; The choice of Java for comparison was not made in a vacuum. No word of spherical cows.

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  • (Score: 2) by FatPhil on Tuesday September 17 2019, @07:13AM

    by FatPhil (863) <pc-soylentNO@SPAMasdf.fi> on Tuesday September 17 2019, @07:13AM (#895049) Homepage
    Fair point, +1. I've mostly ignored Java, as I do more scientific programming than business programming, which emphasises your point - Java clearly has that "business language" aura about it.
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