Fixed point financial data versus floating point - Re: Spreadsheets (was Microsoft flamage)

I am aware of the various options, all I was saying is that packed decimal is heavily used for financial calculations. I believe you have to specify COMP-4 to get fixed point binary, the default USAGE is DISPLAY (for IBM) which is zoned decimal. There are no instructions to do math on zoned (display) fields, so conversions are done by the compiler if those fields are used in calculations. IBM has COMP-5 but I'm not clear from the doc what it does, although it may be more meaningful on Z since the ADDs support longer binary operands. Prior to Z it seems COMP-5 and COMP-4 would have been the same on IBM implementations. -----Original Message----- From: "Chuck Guzis" <cclist at sydex.com> Sender: cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org Date: Mon, 24 Oct 2011 10:24:44 To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts<cctalk at classiccmp.org> Reply-To: "General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts" <cctalk at classiccmp.org> Subject: Re: Fixed point financial data versus floating point - Re: Spreadsheets (was Microsoft flamage) On 24 Oct 2011 at 16:25, Vintage Coder wrote: Only COMP-3 was packed decimal; COMP-1 and COMP-2 are single- and double-precision real/floating/binary exponential. All others are usually internally integers (scaled where a point is specified) unless DISPLAY, which is kept as decimal character. Some COBOLs have other data types such as BINARY-DOUBLE, COMP-5 and explicit specifications such as PACKED-DECIMAL. --Chuck