John If you need a way to support all the IBM HFP and BFP formats including short, long, and extended formats using just COBOL and Java, then you may find the open source z390 Portable Mainframe Assembler and emulator tool useful. It is written entirely in J2SE Java and supports all the problem state instructions including floating point and the new z9 opcode additions which include a few new floating point instructions.
z390 uses the Java native float, double, and BigDecimal class to perform single (32 bit), double (64 bit), and Extended (128) floating point operations. There are also many useful instructions for converting between the floating point types and integer, packed decimal, and zoned decimal. z390 includes a regression test source program TESTFP1 which performs tests of each floating point instruction. For more information visit www.z390.org. Don Higgins [EMAIL PROTECTED] <Message from John W. Gilmore> As many of you know, IBM Enterprise COBOL supports only single- and double-precision IBM hexadecimal floating-point (HFP) data types. In particular, it does not support extended-precision HFP or any of single-, double-, or extended-precision IEEE binary floating-point (BFP) values. Moreover, it would be fair to say that this support is scarcely missed: Few COBOL programmers would make spontaneous use of it if it were available. Java, on the other hand, makes heavy, very heavy, use of BFP, often in situations in which it is not even apparent to a naif Java programmer that it is doing so. My experience in trying to interface a new Java subsystem with some existing COBOL routines was thus discouraging. It was not possible to avoid the use of HLASM interfacing/transmitter routines, which are not maintainable by COBOL or Java programmers, in order to do so. In the upshot I have had to recommend to my client that it avoid any future use of COBOL in many situations; and, while this does not greatly distress me personally, it does suggest that that the issue of what COBOL should support is more complicated than many discussions of this issue here have suggested. John Gilmore Ashland, MA 01721-1817 USA ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
