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: 2002-08-17 07:06:11 PST Path: archiver1.google.com!news1.google.com!newsfeed.stanford.edu!news-spur1.maxwell.syr.edu!news.maxwell.syr.edu!feed.cgocable.net!read1.cgocable.net.POSTED!53ab2750!not-for-mail Message-ID: <3D5E584E.3030900@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: Information Systems Annex (usefulness of Decimal Floats) References: <5ee5b646.0208150126.ac9f65e@posting.google.com> <3D5D1EA5.1040406@cogeco.ca> <5ee5b646.0208170254.75f94823@posting.google.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Date: Sat, 17 Aug 2002 10:06:06 -0400 NNTP-Posting-Host: 24.150.168.167 X-Complaints-To: abuse@cogeco.ca X-Trace: read1.cgocable.net 1029593355 24.150.168.167 (Sat, 17 Aug 2002 10:09:15 EDT) NNTP-Posting-Date: Sat, 17 Aug 2002 10:09:15 EDT Organization: Cogeco Cable Xref: archiver1.google.com comp.lang.ada:28167 Date: 2002-08-17T10:06:06-04:00 List-Id: Robert Dewar wrote: > "Warren W. Gay VE3WWG" wrote in message news:<3D5D1EA5.1040406@cogeco.ca>... >>Robert Dewar wrote: >>>"Robert C. Leif" wrote in message news:... >> >>"Useless" is extreme. There are situations where decimal >>floating point is useful in computing financial values, >>but normally as intermediate results. > > For intermediate results, decimal floating-point offers no > particular advantages over binary floating-point. I disagree because binary floating point carries with it the disadvantage of not being able to represent values like 0.3 (it uses 0.299999 repeat), where a decimal floating point does this precisely. > Indeed > the proposal carefully considered by CODASYL, but as far > as I know not adopted, was to require the use of IEEE > 64-bit binary floating-point arithmetic for calculation > of intermediate results in COMPUTE. I was speaking more generally about "computing financial values" -- not strictly about COBOL. > Note that in general the COBOL style is not to use COMPUTE > but rather to carefully control the intermediate precision > of each step, in which case floating-point offers very little advantage if any. No disagreement there. -- Warren W. Gay VE3WWG http://home.cogeco.ca/~ve3wwg