I think the decision of Tom Ross and his colleagues to first exploit DFP in compiler-generated code is a defensible, entirely appropriate one.
It is an open secret that few COBOL implementations do packed-decimal arithmetic of any real complexity in packed decimal. Historically, they have converted packed-decimal operands into floating-point ones, done the non-trivial arithmetic using register-oriented (as opposed to storage-to-storage) floating-point instructions, and then converted the floating-point results back into fixed-point ones. All of these operations, and in particular the conversions, are greatly facilitated by the availability of DFP-to-and-from-packed-decimal conversion machine instructions. Insurance and banking applications that do non-trivial arithmetic will benefit significantly from this change, which eliminates the need for post processing HFP results to ensure that they do not surprise users and users' customers. Better performance without source-program changes is highly desirable, and this use of DFP provides it. This said---as Tom surely knows---the pressure to make DFP directly available to Enterprise COBOL applications programmers will now grow. John Gilmore, Ashland, MA 01721 - USA ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
