On 12 Apr 2012 21:45:22 -0700, in bit.listserv.ibm-main you wrote: >>According to Tom Ross (of IBM COBOL development) at SHARE last year, they are >>working >>on migrating the "back end" to the same one that PL/I uses. (And I am >>assuming the same >>one some of the other languages also use.) > >>No idea if that would "fix" COBOL arithmetic. > >>Frank > >Frank, > > That is close to what I said. I said that C/C++ and PL/I currently share >a common back end, and that eventually IBM would like all compilers to share >a common backend. In response to another comment, the JIT compiler does >create optimized sequences of instructions, and we hope to use some of >that technology as well in a new COBOL compiler release. > > As for assembler code generated for COBOL usage of BINARY data items, we >are highly influenced by the COBOL standard. COBOL data items are all >base 10, with digits 1-9, so mapping BINARY data items to that requires >some trickery. The good news is that you can process dollars and cents >in many different data types with no floating points if you want to, >unlike some other languages.
So when is COBOL going to support the floating point decimal instructions and the "new" types of rounding in the 2002 standard and now supported by hardware. The definition of that hardware and software support is in Java and was heavily influenced by IBM Fellow Mike Cowlinshaw. As an semi-retired systems and applications programmer who dealt with bit switched in both business applications and SMF records, I needed USAGE BIT and the various native binary usages contained in the 2002 standard in the 1960s, 1970s and beyond. Clark Morris > >Cheers, >TomR >> COBOL is the Language of the Future! << > >---------------------------------------------------------------------- >For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, >send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
