Cobol - Re: Classic RW

Author

Re: Classic RW

Chuck Stevens

2004-08-30, 3:55 pm

"LX-i" <lxi0007@netscape.net> wrote in message
news:NnvYc.34591$5s3.5528@fe40.usenetserver.com...

> Granted, that's not quite the way he said it, but I think that was his
point.

May be, but that's exactly the issue. I suspect it is probably true that a
*majority* of implementations store fixed-point numeric items as integers
and keep track of the necessary scale factors in the compiler-generated
code, and that may indeed be what he meant. I don't believe the standard
*requires* this, but I think a preference toward integer arithmetic is
implicit in the COBOL standards.

I might even be persuaded to agree with him if he had amended "All
fixed-point numbers are integers"
to be something like "Most COBOL environments store and process fixed-point
numeric values as integers" early on in the thread.

What his point (his *conclusion*) was is irrelevant when the *premise* he
drew upon in order to arrive at that point is faulty. Where he tends to
lose credibility is not in making the error in the first place, it is in the
continued instance that, as stated, it was correct and everybody disagreeing
was wrong. In this case, it is not only the original statement but the
*continued insistance* that all fixed-point numbers *really are* integers,
that is absurd.

-Chuck Stevens

Robert Wagner

2004-09-01, 8:55 am

On Tue, 31 Aug 2004 16:31:48 -0700, "Chuck Stevens"
<charles.stevens@unisys.com> wrote:

>Walt Kelly wrote "I refuse to have a battle of wits with an unarmed person."
>I daresay some of us that participate in this forum would probably do well
>to heed that advice.

In Martin Chuzzlewit, Dickens described the character Pecksniff this
way: "Some people likened him to a direction-post, which is always
telling the way to a place, and never goes there."

>William D. Blake wrote "Sometimes I suffer from delusions of adequacy." I
>daresay some of us that participate in this forum would also be well-advised
>to include such a characterization in our own inventory of our individual
>strengths and weaknesses.

" Man would be fain be great and sees that he is little; would fain be
happy and sees that he is miserable; would fain be perfect and sees
that he is full of imperfections; would fain be the object of the
love and esteem of men, and sees that his faults merit only their
aversion and contempt. The embarrassment wherein he finds himself
produces in him the most unjust and criminal passions imaginable, for
he conceives a mortal hatred against TRUTH, which blames him and
convinces him of his faults."
- Pascal, "Pensees"

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