24 Oct
2011
24 Oct
'11
10:24 a.m.
On 24 Oct 2011 at 16:25, Vintage Coder wrote:
Decimal math (hardware supported) is used heavily in
financial
processing with IBM COBOL. No loss of precision because the type is
base 10. BCD is very similar to what IBM calls "packed decimal".
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