From owner-sc22wg5@open-std.org Thu Oct 27 21:39:48 2005 Return-Path: X-Original-To: sc22wg5-domo2 Delivered-To: sc22wg5-domo2@open-std.org Received: by open-std.org (Postfix, from userid 521) id 441D5168D9; Thu, 27 Oct 2005 21:39:48 +0200 (CET DST) X-Original-To: sc22wg5@open-std.org Delivered-To: sc22wg5@open-std.org Received: from dkuug.dk (ptah.dkuug.dk [195.215.30.66]) by open-std.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 41DAA12FAC for ; Thu, 27 Oct 2005 21:39:45 +0200 (CET DST) Received: from mail1.cray.com (mail1.cray.com [136.162.0.111]) by dkuug.dk (8.12.10/8.9.2) with ESMTP id j9RJdLZb063381 for ; Thu, 27 Oct 2005 21:39:26 +0200 (CEST) (envelope-from longb@cray.com) Received: from mh1750-1.us.cray.com (mh1750-1.us.cray.com [172.31.74.55]) by mail1.cray.com (8.13.3/8.13.3/gw-5323) with ESMTP id j9RIjnl8004723 (version=TLSv1/SSLv3 cipher=DHE-RSA-AES256-SHA bits=256 verify=OK); Thu, 27 Oct 2005 13:45:49 -0500 (CDT) Received: from mh2650-1.us.cray.com (mh2650-1.us.cray.com [172.31.74.50]) by mh1750-1.us.cray.com (8.13.4/8.13.3/hub-5273) with ESMTP id j9RIjlXF005786; Thu, 27 Oct 2005 13:45:47 -0500 Received: from cray.com (mh-dhcp-172-31-20-165.us.cray.com [172.31.20.165]) by mh2650-1.us.cray.com (8.13.4/8.13.3/spool-5907) with ESMTP id j9RIjgIa013839; Thu, 27 Oct 2005 13:45:44 -0500 Message-ID: <436121E7.90007@cray.com> Date: Thu, 27 Oct 2005 13:52:23 -0500 From: Bill Long Reply-To: longb@cray.com Organization: Cray Inc. User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.4) Gecko/20030624 Netscape/7.1 X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: j.k.reid@rl.ac.uk Cc: WG5 , "Stevens, Charles C" Subject: Re: (j3.2005) (SC22WG5.3324) SC22 meeting References: <20051027095851.711BA1152F@open-std.org> In-Reply-To: <20051027095851.711BA1152F@open-std.org> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Cray-VirusStatus: clean X-Spam-Score: 0 () Sender: owner-sc22wg5@open-std.org Precedence: bulk John Reid wrote: > > > It is DPD that the Cobol people favour. > > It has also been proposed that decimal arithmetic be removed > altogether. I think that would be a shame. We all use decimal > arithmetic for our thinking and hand calculations. It would be great > if our computers did, too - for example, no rounding would be needed > for formatted output. Does anyone disagree with this position? > > Of course, the Cobol people strongly favour retention of decimal > arithmetic in the new standard. Thanks for your detailed exposition on the decimal arithmetic format options. I still believe that your original response (let others decide) was the correct one. I see the decision on this issue mainly the business of the major players - IEEE, Cobol, and IBM. They will have to live with whatever they decide. It seems outside the scope of WG5. In terms of the arguments for an against having decimal floating point at all, I see the human comfort argument as of secondary importance. If the hardware implementation of decimal floating point results in faster execution than binary floating point, then decimal may be adopted in practice. Otherwise, it will not. For Cobol programs, where there is a lot of format conversion, decimal will probably be faster. For Fortran, the issue is computation speed, and the case is a lot less clear. Cheers, Bill -- Bill Long longb@cray.com Fortran Technical Support & voice: 651-605-9024 Bioinformatics Software Development fax: 651-605-9142 Cray Inc., 1340 Mendota Heights Rd., Mendota Heights, MN, 55120