Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!mcvax!cernvax!pan!jw
From: jw@pan.UUCP (Jamie Watson)
Newsgroups: comp.databases
Subject: Re: Informix 4gl - no integer arithmetic???
Message-ID: <474@pan.UUCP>
Date: 15 Sep 88 21:49:21 GMT
References: <466@pan.UUCP> <410@infmx.UUCP> <468@pan.UUCP> <5876@columbia.edu> <4307@pdn.UUCP>
Reply-To: jw@pan.UUCP (Jamie Watson)
Organization: Adasoft AG, Solothurn, Switzerland
Lines: 19


My original posting on this topic was intended to point out to present and
prospective users of Informix 4GL that there is no integer arithmetic in
this "programming language".  The followup from "Dr. Scump" at Informix did
not offer a solution to my posting; it made a lame attempt to justify what
they have done, and it included an extremely misleading example that was
supposed to show that C does the same thing.  The example specifically
included a floating point number, which of course caused the entire
expression to be evaluated in floating point.

The reply further claimed the C is the "only major language" that does
not promote integers to floats in arithmetic evaluations.  Well, I can
name a few "minor" languages that don't, such as Pascal, Fortran, Modula-2,
and Basic.  There are plenty more.

If anyone is going to apologize, I think it should be "Dr. Scump", for
trying to intentionally mislead the readers of this group.

jw