A GCC COBOL status report

It's not just performance tho. I don't think that was even what the language designers were thinking of when they went for that, but I may be wrong.
When a language makes it easier to do the right thing than it makes doing the wrong thing, you make fewer mistakes. If I need to use a library for proper decimal arithmetic, there's a (high) chance that '0.11' will slip by accident both in my code and in review. Because that's the intuitive thing to write. Now, if '0.11' is actually the right thing and you don't need to give it extra thought, you do the right thing by default, almost by accident.