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<div dir="ltr" data-setdir="false">Thanks for the info about COBOL. That was the first time I've actually seen a segment of COBOL.</div><div dir="ltr" data-setdir="false"><br></div><div dir="ltr" data-setdir="false">I have the same opinion about FORTRAN, which is another legacy language. For engineering problems involving things like complex numbers and trigonometry functions, its great. You define some variables as floating point or complex and then drop them into equations and the compiler figures out which flavor of the function to use and deliver you the result in the expected number type. Most other languages require the programmer to explicitly write code to deal with complex numbers because there is no library subroutine for the sine of a complex number.</div><div dir="ltr" data-setdir="false"><br></div><div dir="ltr" data-setdir="false">Paul</div><div dir="ltr" data-setdir="false"><br></div>
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On Wednesday, February 9, 2022, 12:03:31 PM PST, Deirdre Saoirse Moen <deirdre@deirdre.net> wrote:
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<div><div dir="ltr">I've had a joke I've told for years, and…I was in error.<br></div><div dir="ltr"><br></div><div dir="ltr">"Java is COBOL 2.0."<br></div><div dir="ltr"><br></div><div dir="ltr">The catch is, Java hasn't replaced Cobol in a lot of industries *because it can't*.<br></div><div dir="ltr"><br></div><div dir="ltr">> One of the fun side effects of my summer learning COBOL is that I’m beginning to understand that it’s not that Java can’t do math correctly, it’s how Java does math correctly. And when you understand how Java does math and how COBOL does the same math, you begin to understand why it’s so difficult for many industries to move away from their legacy.<br></div><div dir="ltr"><br></div><div dir="ltr"><a href="https://medium.com/the-technical-archaeologist/is-cobol-holding-you-hostage-with-math-5498c0eb428b" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://medium.com/the-technical-archaeologist/is-cobol-holding-you-hostage-with-math-5498c0eb428b</a><br></div><div dir="ltr"><br></div><div dir="ltr">-- <br></div><div dir="ltr"> Deirdre Saoirse Moen<br></div><div dir="ltr"> <a href="mailto:deirdre@deirdre.net" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">deirdre@deirdre.net</a><br></div><div dir="ltr"><br></div><div dir="ltr">_______________________________________________<br></div><div dir="ltr">conspire mailing list<br></div><div dir="ltr"><a href="mailto:conspire@linuxmafia.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">conspire@linuxmafia.com</a><br></div><div dir="ltr"><a href="http://linuxmafia.com/mailman/listinfo/conspire" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">http://linuxmafia.com/mailman/listinfo/conspire</a><br></div></div>
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