Remember COBOL ?!

ZENER

Does anyone here speak COBOL. It's an ancient language from a far off time that doesn't appear to understand decimel numbers!!

I'm using MicroFocus Personal Cobol V3.11 for Windows 95 on a Win 98 machine. I seems to run fine except that I cant get decimel points to show up. For example:

SUM-NUM PIC X(5) VALUE "12.567".

Will display:

12.567

the decimel point present, but:

SUM-NUM PIC Z9V999 VALUE 12.567.

DISPLAY "The number is: "SUM-NUM.

Returns 12567 !!

Am I doing something daft ?
I have ACUCOBOL GT and it works fine, why won't this.

Regards

ZEN

Hobbes

Shouldn't it be..

ZZ.999 ? or 99V999

b3t4

I think you should have
SUM-NUM PIC Z9V999 VALUE 12567.

No decimal point in the VALUE as the V in the PIC puts it in for you. Numbers can only contain numbers no fancy things like decimal points :-)

I'm not overly certain of this however.
Best of luck.
A.

Merrion

The V indicates an implied decimal point.
This is used to allow you to do integer maths with decimals - kind of thing that happens a lot in financial calculations which is what COBOL was designed for (and is good at).

Lemming

Hobbes wrote:

Shouldn't it be..

ZZ.999 ? or 99V999

iirc from my college days (and I don't particularly want to given that this is COBOL that we're talking about), isn't it 99v999?

COBOL; Completely Obsolete Business Oriented Language



PCMCIA; People Can't Memorise Computer Industry Acrynoms

*drum crash* Thank you folks! I'm here all week!

b3t4

99V999 or Z9V999 or ZZV999 are fine.

Z suppresses zeroes, iirc

Some examples
PIC 99V999 VALUE 2345 Ouputs 02.345
PIC Z9V999 VALUE 2345 Ouputs 2.345
PIC ZZV999 VALUE 0345 Ouputs .345
PIC ZZV999 VALUE 345 Ouputs .345

<edit>just checked and all of the above are correct</edit>

A.

ZENER

I'd never have believed that so many of you knew about COBOL !!

Any way I got it figured out. Internal numbers with decimel points are stored:

01 ANY-NUMBER PIC ZZ9V99 VALUE = .94

RESULT 094 <-- THE "." IS "IMPLIED"

IN ORDER TO DISPLAY A NUMBER WITH A "." :

01 DISPLAY-RESULT PIC ZZ9.99

OR IF YOU DEFINE A CURRENCY

01 DISPLAY-RESULT PIC €€9.99

So if ANY-NUMBER (e.g. 13.67) is MOVED to DISPLAY-RESULT and
ANY-NUMBER then:

DISPLAY DISPLAY-RESULT.
DISPLAY ANY-NUMBER.

Would return:

€13.67
01367

Seems numbers with "." cannot be used in calculations as said above.

Thanks All !

ZEN

Armen Tanzerian

Something like 70% of the world's data is wrapped in COBOL. I'd say it's fairly decent at understanding decimal numbers. I have worked at it for the last 15 years in the States. For a lazy person like myself it's a great language, never changes. The systems programmers use the new functions, which are actually quite impressive, but application programmers do what they've always done. No refresher courses for me. :cool:

ZENER

When I was told I'd be using COBOL for my assignments I thought it was a bit out-dated, seems I'm well wide of the mark though. It's easy to follow compared to something like Java but then I suppose their objectives are different.

Thanks again for the info lads - it's all been filed under E for Experience !

ZEN