On 14 September 2016 at 16:34, Bill Woodger <[email protected]> wrote:
> When IBM decided to use "character" comparisons where possible for numerics, > they had to ban the negative zero. > Although in a decimal compare a zero is zero, no matter how signed, in a > character compare it is not. Ergo -ve zero could > not be allowed to exist. (you can of course screw things up by being > deliberate, but no calculation in COBOL will ever > generate a -ve zero result, nor will any truncation). So in COBOL, +0 times -5 is +0, i.e the rules of algebra don't apply? The generated code must go out of its way to accomplish this. Tony H. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
