A GCC COBOL status report

Posted Feb 13, 2023 20:58 UTC (Mon) by rgmoore (✭ supporter ✭, #75)
In reply to: A GCC COBOL status report by mmaug
Parent article: A GCC COBOL status report

This seems like a good example of needing to understand the problem space in order to understand the solution. It turns out that payroll and accounting have specific needs different from most computer programs. Their programs have to calculate numbers according to accounting rules, which are sufficiently different from standard floating point math that you can't just use floats and assume everything will come out right. COBOL is built to handle those financial calculations, so people who really need that accuracy use it. Those are the user requirements, and they are really non-negotiable.