Subj : Re: RIP Niklaus Wirth
To   : Dr. What
From : tenser
Date : Wed Jan 10 2024 11:03:41

On 09 Jan 2024 at 08:03a, Dr. What pondered and said...
 
 DW> -=> tenser wrote to poindexter FORTRAN <=-
 DW> 
 DW>  te> Hey, with IBM pushing AI to translate those piles of
 DW>  te> dusty COBOL into Java, maybe you'd never need it!
 DW> 
 DW> It would be interesting to see that Java code.

I bet it's not great right now, but I have no real
insight into that.

 DW> COBOL primarily runs on IBM (or compatible) mainframes.  Those
 DW> mainframes are, in effect, COBOL machines.
 DW> 
 DW> I remember doing assembly language on them and was surprised when I
 DW> found an assembly command to add 2 packed numbers.
 DW> 
 DW> (For those who don't know, "packed" is something like BCD.  The number
 DW> 1234 would be "packed" into 3 bytes of "01", "23" and "4C" (the "C" is a
 DW> sign.)
 DW> 
 DW> Every other assembly language I ever encountered only worked on binary
 DW> format numbers.

I'd categorize them more as "business machines" for
commercial data processing.  In that world, packed
decimal representations were de rigor; the VAX had
a similar part of the instruction set for a while,
but it was eventually removed and the operating
system would emulate it in software if it trapped on
an illegal instruction from an old binary.

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A48 (Linux/64)
 * Origin: Agency BBS | Dunedin, New Zealand | agency.bbs.nz (21:1/101)

.