> This situation has barely improved in the 25+ years I've been in IT. Improved? 25+ years ago this would have been written in COBOL using decimal arithmetic a

> This situation has barely improved in the 25+ years I've been in IT. Improved? 25+ years ago this would have been written in COBOL using decimal arithmetic as a matter of course — because 55 years ago the designers of COBOL knew better than to put floating point in a business language. (This is not a defense of COBOL, which is terrible in so many ways, because they didn't know much about programming in 1955 — but they knew they had to understand the problem domain.)