Morning François,

Per wrote :

>> >> you cant change the world, change yourself!" might usefully be applied
to
>> >> the problem.

you replied  :

>> Or in this situation; if more serious work is involved, avoid Qdos/Smsq
;-)

I'm afraid it isn't any better in the mainframe, Unix server or PC world.
Floating point numbers either can or cannot be represented accurately. You
could use C68 and use IEEE format floats (or even doubles) but you still
cannot represent numbers like '10 and one third' correctly. I work in a
software house which writes financial packages for finance companies, Banks,
the motor industry etc and accuracy is needed - but you can't get it with
floating point. All our calculations are done in integer values - even for
currencies which have huge number - like the old Italian Lira (of which I'm
very fond - 1977 was the only time I've ever been a millionaire !).

QDOSMSQ's main problem , as you have found, is not so much the range of
numbers that can be represented, but the way that the software displays it.
I'm sure some of the procedure wriuters amongst us, who understand these
floating point things (I don't !), could write a routine to take in a float
and return a 'proper' string representation for display purposes ...........

Regards,
Norman.

-------------------------------------
Norman Dunbar
Database/Unix administrator
Lynx Financial Systems Ltd.
mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Tel: 0113 289 6265
Fax: 0113 289 3146
URL: http://www.Lynx-FS.com
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