Re: [GNU-COBOL] PIC -> edit masks -> a standard large numericrepresentation

["David L. Nicol" <david@kasey.umkc.edu>]

Boris Kortiak wrote:
> 
> >>> "David L. Nicol" <david@kasey.umkc.edu> 10/28/99 11:06AM >>>
> DN-
> <snip>
> 
> Records could then be stored as arrays of these 10-byte things,
> 
> I'm not sure I understand this.  Do you mean that the physical record stored on some media would be a 10 Byte structure?  That would be wrong.
> 
> On the other hand, if you mean that internal to the compiler this is how numbers would be represented, manipulated and compared, maybe.
> 
> Of course I could be completely misunderstanding what you are saying.

I'm talking about internal to the running, compiled program.  I think
sacrificing memory footprint for ease of development is the right thing
here.  Implementing a "cobol scalar" on top of some other general
purpose
data type like a MFC "string" or a perl scalar, and tieing that object
with a tightly formatted little data element that represents the PIC
for that datum looks like a reasonable way to go for internal run-time
data handling.

Conversion tools would have to be able to pack and unpack into the
various formats to take care of Brilliant Pic Tricks as discussed here
previously but IMO implementing a BCD math library and referring to it
whenever you want an addition is silly today.




_______________________________________________________
               David Nicol 816.235.1187 nicold@umkc.edu
      Vendor extensions are quicksand -- Chad Slaughter

--
This message was sent through the gnu-cobol mailing list.  To remove yourself
from this mailing list, send a message to majordomo@lusars.net with the
words "unsubscribe gnu-cobol" in the message body.  For more information on
the GNU COBOL project, send mail to gnu-cobol-owner@lusars.net.