Re: [MacPerl] Cobol replacement?

[Karsten Meier <krstnmr@ibm.net>]

According to the cited Article
(CACM September 1997, Robert L. Glass: Cobol - A Contradiction and a 
Enigma)
the List for a buisness programming language are the following:

1. hetrogeneous "record-structure" data
2. decimal arithmetik
3. convienent report generation
4. accessing and manipulating masses of data:
   (indexsequentiel files and relational databases)

Point 3 is a clear winner for perl
Point 1 and 4 can be done

critical (as in most other languages) is point 2
for simple project you may use just integers and 
muliply them by 100 or 1000, but and you have always to remember
that this number is in reality only one hundreth of the number.

we need a dezimal module to handle this Point in perl.
we can either override the arithmetik operators with
the overload module(like in math::bigfloat), 
or we may use tie mechanism and store them as integer,
but on every access they are divided by 100 or 1000

But you may do a lot of work in building such a module, 
only to see it can not handle a special case in your apporach,
the problem may be that the user of your module is not aware 
that this special case must be handled different, and the 
program may fail with a result wrong by factor of 100!

Karsten Meier


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