[Info-vax] Programming languages on VMS

[Bill Gunshannon]

On 01/24/2018 01:21 PM, Craig A. Berry wrote:
> On Wednesday, January 24, 2018 at 11:26:04 AM UTC-6, Bill Gunshannon wrote:
>> What data type of none-integer does
>> BASIC support that can do calculations with decimals without the
>> cumulative error common to floating point?
> 
> Just a wild guess, but maybe the DECIMAL data type?
> 
> $ help/library=basichelp data_types decimal
> 
> 
> DATA_TYPES
> 
>    DECIMAL
> 
>       The DECIMAL(d,s) data type keyword specifies  packed  decimal  data.   A
>       packed  decimal  value  has  a  specified  number  of  digits  (d) and a
>       specified decimal point position (s).
> 
> 
> Topic?
> 

Thank you.  I suspected there was such in DEC BASIC.
Thus leading to my next question.

Is it part of the ANSI Standard? How many versions of BASIC have
it?  It is always a bad idea to bet on non-standard features in
any language.  It is one of the reasons Pascal languished outside
of academia (which is where it was designed for, not to teach a
language but to teach concepts.)

It is also one of the primary reasons Ada was defined as it was.
No Subset or Superset can call itself Ada. (Didn't really work
either, but DOD did try :-).

bill