24 Oct
2011
24 Oct
'11
11:38 a.m.
On 24 Oct 2011 at 17:58, Vintage Coder wrote:
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.
Who needs zoned instructions? We did display arithmetic the CDC
machines in display code using ordinary binary primitives (see my
post on Univac "tricks"). And we didn't have character
addressability.
During my tenure at CDC, the 6000 series machines running COBOL
consistently beat the IBM high-end iron on benchmarks, in spite of
the IBM sales team telling customers that CDC made FORTRAN machines.
A fast CPU is generally a fast CPU for any language. You don't need
lots of specialized instructions.
--Chuck