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From: dewar@gnat.com (Robert Dewar)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: Decimal Floating types
Date: 17 Aug 2002 03:52:07 -0700
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"Warren W. Gay VE3WWG" <ve3wwg@cogeco.ca> wrote in message news:<3D5D2529.8070501@cogeco.ca>...
> But for COBOL it means using
> library calls directly instead of a more natural 
> "mathematic expression", whatever that be in COBOL ;-) 

As I mentioned in my previous message, it is not usual
to use COMPUTE at all in COBOL, so the difference is 
between

   ADD FIELD-1 TO FIELD-2 GIVING FIELD-3.

and

   CALL DEC-FLOAT-ADD USING FIELD-1 FIELD-2 FIELD-3

Now to be fair, it will be a bit annoying that for the
CALL, these fields have to be defined in a particular way,
but the requirement for decimal floating-point is marginal
in any case, so one can live with this perfectly well.

> 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. 

You exaggerate. Probably because of "lack of knowledge of
modern COBOL" :-)

Seriously, I don't see any significant maintenance problem
here. COBOL programmers use libraries all the time.