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From: warren@jove.cs.pdx.edu (Warren Harrison)
Newsgroups: comp.software-eng
Subject: Floating Point in COBOL
Message-ID: <1137@psueea.UUCP>
Date: 5 May 89 01:24:35 GMT
Sender: news@psueea.UUCP
Reply-To: warren@jove.cs.pdx.edu (Warren Harrison)
Organization: Dept. of Computer Science, Portland State University; Portland OR
Lines: 31

Perhaps this is stretching a point since after checking, I found out this
is an IBM extension to the ANSI-78 standard, but COMP-1 and COMP-2 are
single and double word floating point data types, aligned on fullword and
doubleword boundaries, respectively.  Computational is fixed point.   True,
COMP-3 (packed decimal) is limited to 36 characters, but I know of no other
language which provides this much accuracy (remember, this stuff is stored
in base 10, so round off errors are significantly reduced) in a data type.
36 decimal places is: 999999999999999999999999999999999999.

Please note that I didn't suggest COBOL was an all purpose programming
language, but that modular programs could be written at least as easy in
it as in most other langauges, and much easier than in many other languages.

The overhead of a COBOL subprogram call is probably less than the overhead
of a Pascal call since local variables do not have to be generated each time
(data items within the subprogram are static), thus you have less of a performance
ding against subprogram calls than in many other "modular" langauges.

I know of many non-commercial applications that have been written in COBOL.
For example I have been told that Micro Focus COBOL/2 is written in COBOL.
I myself have written a COBOL subset compiler in COBOL (and Pascal
compilers in Pascal - I failed to see much difference once you're familiar
with the language).  So far, no operating systems or flight control software
though :-)

Warren

Warren Harrison                CSNET: warren@pdx.edu
Department of Computer Science UUCP:  {ucbvax,decvax}!tektronix!psu-cs!warren
Portland State University      Internet: warren%pdx.edu@relay.cs.net
Portland, OR 97207-0751