>There is evidence that IBM's COBOL people are thinking hard about >making Mike Cowlishaw's ANSI-standard DFP available in COBOL. They >may even have progressed further. Tom can, however, speak for himself >and will, I suspect, do so.
Actually, we have it on our list of things that we will for sure do. More interesting, I think, is that we use DFP instructions heavily , in COBOL V5 for all kinds of decimal arithmetic, with External Decimal conversion and arithmetic on Packed-Decimal data. This is more interesting because lots of shops have External Decimal and Packed-Decimal data, while almost NO shops have Decimal Floating Point data. In fact, many shops have hex floating-point data stored in databases today. So, adding a DFP data type for COBOL would not really help anyone right away. To take advantage, users would have to write new code, create new data (or convert old data) and build up DFP data that way. Adding exploitation of DFP instructions to COBOL V5 means everyone can take advantage of these wonderful instructions without changing any data or source programs! All you have to do is convert your PDS dataset COBOL load libraries to PDSE dataset load libraries and then buy COBOL V5! Cheers, TomR >> COBOL is the Language of the Future! << ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
