>I realize that this is belated but yes I would vigorously dispute him. >Mike Cowlishaw of Rexx renown worked diligently on defining decimal >floating point and the standard for it. The z series has had decimal >floating point for a number of years. It has been supported in PL1, >C/C++ and Java. To date it has NOT been implemented in COBOL despite >the claim for Java interoperability and the fact that decimal floating >point natively supports 6 types of rounding.
Clark, if you still attended SHARE and our numerous discussions of what z/OS COBOL customers want added to COBOL, you would know that almost no one is interested in adding a new floating point data type to COBOL, (other than you). OTH, IBM is interested in it, and that is why we have accepted the requirement to add DFP data type support to COBOL, which you would also know if you still attended SHARE or asked someone in IBM. Finally, the new version of COBOL (V5.1) uses DFP instructions to do decimal arithmetic faster on other data types, such as external decimal and packed decimal. Finally, just to explain my email closing, COBOL will always be with us because it does what people need it do efficiently, and because there is so much of it running the world today that even if we spent all of our money and time trying to convert it to some other language, we would still have not completed the job in 20 years. Besides, if you convert an application from one language to another, you end up with the same application that you started with, except maybe with new bugs and maybe less function, and you just lost a lot of money. And whatever language you converted to will be legacy in a few years. Google "Java is dead" for some fun. Ruby killed Java, Groovy killed Ruby, etc, etc. Yeah, I have heard "x is dead" before, eh? It has taken us a while, but we now have a modern backend (code generator and optimizer) for COBOL that can exploit the latest hardware, and will support DFP, AMODE 64 and many of the other z/OS system features that we have not be able to exploit in the past. Cheers, TomR >> COBOL is the Language of the Future! << ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
