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From: John Levine <johnl@taugh.com>
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: old instructions, Continuations
Date: Wed, 17 Jul 2024 19:19:26 -0000 (UTC)
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According to Scott Lurndal <slp53@pacbell.net>:
>>I suspect that as compute power grew, the kinds of things we wanted out
>>of EDIT changed.
>>
>>negative numbers printed in red
>>negative numbers surrounded with parens (-123.45)
>>decimal point and comma LOCAL selection
>>NaN
>>INFINITY
>
>EDIT/EDT instructions were designed from the start for
>COBOL fixed point arithmetic.   No Nan, No Infinities.

Yes, but don't forget RPG.  It was never fashionable but
there sure was a lot of it.  Still is on whatever they
call AS/400 aka System i these days.

>COBOL had verbs to assign the correct characters as
>the decimal point and thousands separator 

      DECIMAL POINT IS COMMA.

>The problem is that the modern languages don't have
>a modern concept of a PICture clause.   An instruction
>to format based on a printf-like format string could
>be useful, I suspect, but the die area is probably more
>useful as cache.

More important, libraries are basically free now. Every program
links to megabytes of shard libraries and nobody cares.




-- 
Regards,
John Levine, johnl@taugh.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies",
Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. https://jl.ly