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 03:54:46 PST Path: archiver1.google.com!postnews1.google.com!not-for-mail From: dewar@gnat.com (Robert Dewar) Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: Information Systems Annex (usefulness of Decimal Floats) Date: 17 Aug 2002 03:54:45 -0700 Organization: http://groups.google.com/ Message-ID: <5ee5b646.0208170254.75f94823@posting.google.com> References: <5ee5b646.0208150126.ac9f65e@posting.google.com> <3D5D1EA5.1040406@cogeco.ca> NNTP-Posting-Host: 205.232.38.14 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-Trace: posting.google.com 1029581685 16366 127.0.0.1 (17 Aug 2002 10:54:45 GMT) X-Complaints-To: groups-abuse@google.com NNTP-Posting-Date: 17 Aug 2002 10:54:45 GMT Xref: archiver1.google.com comp.lang.ada:28160 Date: 2002-08-17T10:54:45+00:00 List-Id: "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. 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. 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.