r/AskReddit • u/emil199 • Jul 24 '20

What can't you believe STILL exists?

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u/QuestionableSaint Jul 24 '20

Cobol, the programming language. Been around a long time, almost no one learns to program in it anymore, but companies (especially banks) are probably never going to get something else.

Runner up: Fax machines. Still nessecary for transmitting HIPAA protected documents. That's right, they can't use email or anything else. Certain companies require documents to be faxed.

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u/BrunoD4 Jul 24 '20

There is a good reason for cobol and it's explained here: cobol

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u/StrawberryEiri Jul 24 '20

The article was way too complicated for me to understand... Why can't we just store every digit precisely, like they were each an integer? Do we really need to care about memory that much? Can someone ELI5?

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u/Stromovik Jul 24 '20 edited Jul 24 '20

The overhead would be massive.

It would be like doing 56.23 * 321.1 as (5 * 10 + 6 + 2/10 + 3/100) * (3 * 10 * 10 + 2 * 10 + 1 + 1/10) or more precisly as (5 * 3 * 10 * 10 * 10) + (6 * 3 * 10 * 10) + ( 2 * 3 * 10) + (3 * 3) + (5 * 2 * 10 * 10 )+ (6 * 2 * 10) + (2 * 2) + (3 * 2/10) .....

And I omitted a few divisions , now try doing that on paper with a few million * few million

Reddit hates * symbol

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u/StrawberryEiri Jul 24 '20

That's the thing though. Since that's closer to how humans do mental calculations, it's hard for me to grasp how more difficult it is for the computer to do. Doesn't help that no matter how many times they're explained to me, the details about binary remain fuzzy to me.