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A comment on COBOL: You’re thinking about it wrong – GCN.

Re:COBOL: You’re thinking about it wrong – GCN by MelvinButtsESQ on Friday March 03, 2023 @10:44AM (#35011068)
COBOL is easy. JCL is the hard part.
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Re:COBOL: You’re thinking about it wrong – GCN by cratermoon on Friday March 03, 2023 @10:55AM (#35011226)
COBOL is good for dealing with money because it was built with the sort of numeric types required as a natural part of the language. Popular programming languages treat them as an afterthought and provide awkward library functions, if they have anything at all.
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Re:COBOL: You’re thinking about it wrong – GCN by AndrewDucker on Friday March 03, 2023 @11:00AM (#35011301)
C# has Decimal built in. Enough precision for any money-related calculation.
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Re:COBOL: You’re thinking about it wrong – GCN by ElectricalUnion on Friday March 03, 2023 @03:52PM (#35014833)
Lots of languages have Decimals (and arbitrary precision integers for another example) builtin, but they're usually never the default.
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Re:COBOL: You’re thinking about it wrong – GCN by cratermoon on Saturday March 04, 2023 @01:23PM (#35023083)
Which of the top 10 languages from the Tiobe index have a decimal type baked^* into the language?

* Is a type in the standard library "baked in"? I lean towards no, but I'll give the language A for effort anyway.

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Re:COBOL: You’re thinking about it wrong – GCN by AndrewDucker on Sunday March 05, 2023 @06:02PM (#35035170) 

  1) Python - added to the standard library in 2003.
  2) C - no.
  3) Java - BigDecimal in the standard library.
  4) C++ - no.
  5) C# - built in.
  6) VB - Currency type kinda does what you'd want, but   doesn't scale down very far.
  7) Javascript - no.  (Use https://github.com/MikeMcl/bignumber.js)
  8) SQL - Yes.  But check your dialect.
  9) PHP - No.
  10) Go - No.  (Use https://pkg.go.dev/github.com/shopspring/decimal)
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Re:COBOL: You’re thinking about it wrong – GCN by JohnFen on Friday March 03, 2023 @11:42AM (#35011881)
shiver

That's a fact. A couple of years ago, I had to brush off my JCL skills for a job. It reminded me of why I was so happy when I didn't have to use JCL anymore.

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Re:COBOL: You’re thinking about it wrong – GCN by YeGoblynQueenne on Friday March 03, 2023 @12:09PM (#35012280)
On the bright side, you can generate all your JCL with Rexx.
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Re:COBOL: You’re thinking about it wrong – GCN by bitfhacker on Friday March 03, 2023 @01:05PM (#35013022)
Or with chatGPT!!
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