Uh, there wasn't a Firebird day one. Firebird came from Interbase which was originally Groton Database Systems which was a follow on to DEC's Rdb/ELN, an implementation of DSRI (DEC Standard Relational Interface). All defined the remarkably stupid packed decimal data type and none implemented it.
In my youth, I worked summers for A.C. Nielson, the TV rating guys. At one point I was reviewing some 360 assembler code that needed to add two numbers in registers. Rather than just adding them, the guy converted each to packed decimal, added them, and converted the result back to binary. I asked the author why he did that. He said it was necessary because each number was decimal. I frequently heard a variation on the argument applied to scaled binary with a decimal scale factor. Oh, well... > On Aug 5, 2014, at 5:50 AM, Dmitry Yemanov <[email protected]> wrote: > > 05.08.2014 12:19, Mark Rotteveel wrote: > >> Not an authorative answer, but it seems that dtype_packed is also known in >> COBOL (and SAP) for a BCD (binary coded decimal). >> >> If that also applies to Firebird, I am not sure. > > dtype_packed really seems to be a packed decimal, however it's not used > by Firebird since day one. Kinda historical artifact. > > > Dmitry > > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ > Infragistics Professional > Build stunning WinForms apps today! > Reboot your WinForms applications with our WinForms controls. > Build a bridge from your legacy apps to the future. > http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=153845071&iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk > Firebird-Devel mailing list, web interface at > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/firebird-devel ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Infragistics Professional Build stunning WinForms apps today! Reboot your WinForms applications with our WinForms controls. Build a bridge from your legacy apps to the future. http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=153845071&iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk Firebird-Devel mailing list, web interface at https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/firebird-devel
