zMan accuses me of 'pissiness'. In fact I posted a neutral technical exposition of the two packed-decimal formats. Mr Comstock responded with, "No, <inaccurate text>".
Now he and others are free use words as they please. There is august precedent for doing so. As Lewis Carroll wrote in TtLG, "When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less." Still, this forum is [mostly] about zArchitecture machines, and for them there are two packed-decimal formats. My own view of the packed-decimal data type was never enthusiastic and is now very negative. Storage-to-storage arithmetic was always obscene, but there was a sort of rationale for its use in some business applications: HFP and BFP can yield rounding results that surprise the uninitiated. Mike Cowlishaw's DFP has now dealt definitively with these problems, and any rationale for doing even business arithmetic in anything but DFP has now also been removed. The question how many people use DFP in assembly language is one that I do not really know the answer to. I should guess not many, but that is only a guess, and I myself use it routinely. (It is rather easier to use in assembly language than HFP, and both it and BFP make available conversion instructions the absence of which was the chief obstacle to the use of HFP in assembly language.) If there is any significant feeling that I should withdraw from this list too, I am quite willing to do so. It can survive handily without me and I without it. John Gilmore, Ashland, MA 01721 - USA ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
