I feel a little like a Zoroastrian intruding into a discussion among Thomist theologians about whether the archangels in moving from Samarra to Novara pass through the intervening space, but the whole notion of imposing decimal-picture constraints upon binary arithmetic strikes me as absurd.
Now that it is available TRUNC(OPT) has everything to recommend it. It is faster, more accurate, and yields results that are more perspicuous to any but a diseased imagination. Any situation in which the twos-complement byte, halfword, and fullword hardware bounds -128 <= y < +127 (-2^7 <= y <= +2^7 - 1) (-2^15 <- h <= +2^15 - 1) -32768 <= h <= +32767 -2147483648 <= f <= +2147483647 (-2^31 <= f <= +2^31 - 1) are adjusted implicitly during and following arithmetic operations results in the generation of more (sometimes much more) and sillier code. (Explicit operations that use MAX, MIN, or both are available for performing such operations where, exceptionally, they are appropriate.) 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
