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Comment by jeberle | Hacker News Reader

It would be a nice surprise to come across an article on COBOL that has anything nice to say, much less informative, about the language. One could start with that it's one of a tiny minority of languages based on decimal arithmetic as opposed to binary. This is kind of handy when dealing with money.

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There you go: "The Beauty of the COBOL Programming Language" https://devops.com/the-beauty-of-the-cobol-programming-langu...

The "PIC" syntax for variable declaration is an amazing idea that should be more widely copied.

I'm also a fan of COBOL's use of '.' as a statement terminator instead of ';' like the ALGOL languages.

Perl 6 uses rational arithmetic by default (or by defining typed variables), which covers the money use case well. And, of course, we have SQL's DECIMAL type in most backends.

And Common Lisp, although it’s not necessarily “default”. (/ 2 3) works as expected, but 1.7 is a float (unfortunately), and not a rational 17/100. Shame, really.

17/10

Nothing unfortunate about that. When you work with rationals, it's very easy to grow incredibly large denominators, at which point all arithmetic operations slow to a crawl. Floats are fast and predictable, which is why they're used for most calculations in CL and other languages.

Except when you hit denormals or underflow. Or accidentally lose precision ending up with a wrong result.

If I could get a cent for every money transaction done on floats and incorrectly rounded, I'd be a billionaire.

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