Re: Decimal Floating types

["Warren W. Gay VE3WWG" <ve3wwg@cogeco.ca>]

Robert Dewar wrote:
> "Robert C. Leif" <rleif@rleif.com> wrote in message news:<mailman.1029448504.10558.comp.lang.ada@ada.eu.org>...
>>Since COBOL does not have a decimal floating point, COBOL 
>>programmers, who still do most of the financial 
>>applications, have not had a chance
>>to try it!.
...
> Furthermore, as I noted before, there is no point in embedding such a
> feature into the language. If you want
> decimal floating-point, just use a library, there are many,
> that supply this capability and make calls to this library.
> That's what the compiler would do anyway.
> 
> COBOL programmers can perfectly well use such libraries.
> COBOL is perfectly capable of calling library routines!

It is not a problem for Ada or C++ to embrace a library, because
wrappers can be put around those calls to allow the natural use
of the +/- and other operators. But for COBOL it means using
library calls directly instead of a more natural "mathematic
expression", whatever that be in COBOL ;-)  But then, maybe
my knowledge of modern COBOL is limited.

To a maintenance programmer, there is nothing worse than
difficult to read code: library support for floating
decimal in COBOL does precisely this, AFAIK. It solves
one problem and creates another. For Ada, this is a non-issue
(apart from the limitations of the Adjust() primitive).
-- 
Warren W. Gay VE3WWG
http://home.cogeco.ca/~ve3wwg