The lack of full floating point support after all this time in IBM COBOL does seem to indicate a decline in its support. For an example of what full floating point support in mainframe COBOL looks like, check out the portable open source zCOBOL which runs on Windows, Linux, and Apple OSX. The compiler produces readable HLASM assembler source with data field labels which in turn runs on z390 portable mainframe assembler and emulator written entirely in open source J2SE java. zCOBOL supports HFP, BFP, and DFP using the 2002 COBOL standard recommended naming conventions for the 9 different floating point data types. Here is link to article with example floating point compute statement using all 9 floating point types:
http://www.z390.org/zcobol/demo/callcomp/zCOBOL_COMPUTE.pdf Don Higgins d...@higgins.net www.don-higgins.net ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN