Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!csd4.csd.uwm.edu!bionet!apple!sun-barr!newstop!sun!road!khb From: khb@road.Sun.COM (road) Newsgroups: comp.arch Subject: Re: Re: VAX bashing and language specificity of processors (Was: Memory utilization & inter-process contention) Message-ID: <123957@sun.Eng.Sun.COM> Date: 30 Aug 89 02:09:11 GMT References: <650012@hpclscu.HP.COM> Sender: news@sun.Eng.Sun.COM Reply-To: khb@sun.UUCP (road) Organization: Sun Microsystems, Mountain View Lines: 23 In article <650012@hpclscu.HP.COM> shankar@hpclscu.HP.COM (Shankar Unni) writes: >Henry Spencer writes: > >> the fine points is still desirable.) Compiler designers today understand >> that it may be better to convert COBOL numbers to binary for arithmetic >> than to mess up the hardware with decimal instructions, for example. >> COBOL programs are seldom arithmetic-bound anyway. > >A minor point (I agree with everything else you said on this topic): > >It is *not* generally OK for COBOL numbers to be converted to binary for >arithmetic. COBOL programmers work in exact fixed point fractions. >Converting to floating point, while taking care of the magnitude, leaves >much to be desired in terms of precision. Integer arithmetic has the >opposite problem: precision is fine, magnitude is not. I believe Herny was suggesting that operations on integers (or sets of integers) rather than BCD. No one is suggesting, that I know of, that BCD be converted to floating point and etc. Keith H. Bierman |*My thoughts are my own. !! kbierman@sun.com It's Not My Fault | MTS --Only my work belongs to Sun* I Voted for Bill & | Advanced Languages/Floating Point Group Opus | "When the going gets Weird .. the Weird turn PRO"