From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00 autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,18f7f6e041b3e0bf X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public X-Google-ArrivalTime: 2002-08-16 09:15:38 PST Path: archiver1.google.com!news1.google.com!newsfeed.stanford.edu!logbridge.uoregon.edu!news.stealth.net!news.stealth.net!feed.cgocable.net!read2.cgocable.net.POSTED!53ab2750!not-for-mail Message-ID: <3D5D2529.8070501@cogeco.ca> From: "Warren W. Gay VE3WWG" User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Win98; en-US; rv:1.0rc2) Gecko/20020618 Netscape/7.0b1 X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: Decimal Floating types References: <5ee5b646.0208160721.7ae05a3@posting.google.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Date: Fri, 16 Aug 2002 12:15:37 -0400 NNTP-Posting-Host: 24.150.168.167 X-Complaints-To: abuse@cogeco.ca X-Trace: read2.cgocable.net 1029514605 24.150.168.167 (Fri, 16 Aug 2002 12:16:45 EDT) NNTP-Posting-Date: Fri, 16 Aug 2002 12:16:45 EDT Organization: Cogeco Cable Xref: archiver1.google.com comp.lang.ada:28120 Date: 2002-08-16T12:15:37-04:00 List-Id: Robert Dewar wrote: > "Robert C. Leif" wrote in message news:... >>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