RE: Entry Parameters

["Shaw, David" <dshaw@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Yeah, that's right, the VAX had COBOL, too, so it needed decimal.  It was just
that many of the early business packages for it were written in languages like
Fortran that didn't support decimal arithmetic.  Thanks for that reminder!

Dave Shaw

-----Original Message-----
From: John Hall [mailto:jhall@hillmgt.com]

"Shaw, David" wrote:
> < BIG SNIP >
>  My experience is that
> the decimal arithmetic issue mainly applies to the scientific machines, things
> like VAXes and Unix boxes.

Actually the VAX system I was using in 1985 had a decimal data type of
at least 30 digits precision.  It was basically a character string (1
digit per byte) but the CPU instruction set could add, multiply etc. 
Problem was the data type was not available in all languages.  Because
we only had fortran on the system we had to use assembly to use the
instruction set for that data type.  
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