RE: storing fractions of inches in a data field

-----Original Message-----
From: midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Booth Martin
Sent: Friday, December 12, 2008 9:07 AM
To: Midrange Systems Technical Discussion
Subject: storing fractions of inches in a data field

I have an application that goes back to the 1970s which
measures stock
in inches and fractions. It was designed with 2 fields for every
measurement{ a field for whole inches and a field for
sixteenths. 3,
8 would be 3 1/2 inches, 3 9 would be 3, 9/16ths inches.
There is
some talk of modernizing that.

What would be another way of handling it? 3.5 and 3.5625 are
probably
not going to fly as a solution since it is too hard to teach on the
production floor (I am told).

Any ideas? Alternatives that might work? :)

--
---------------------------------
Booth Martin

Why change what "the floor" sees at all? If you want to store the
information in a "integer" type field, why not just say that the field
contains the size of the part in units of 1/16 inch? On input, you still
have the two fields. I don't know the names, so I'll just say that I1 is
the inches and I2 is the 16ths of an inch. Store the variable via

UPDATE table SET column=I1*16+I2;

When you want to display, get the column into a host variable and recalc
I1 and I2.

In C, I would do this as:

I1=column>>4; /* integer divide by 16 */
I2=column&&0x0F /* remainder after divide by 16 */

In COBOL, something like:

DIVIDE column BY 16 GIVING I1 REMAINDER I2.

--
John McKown
Systems Engineer IV
IT

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