[Info-vax] VMS Software Q1 '23 Update

[John Reagan]

On Tuesday, January 31, 2023 at 11:16:10 AM UTC-5, Stephen Hoffman wrote:
> On 2023-01-31 14:07:05 +0000, Simon Clubley said: 
> 
> > I would not disagree with that. Having never really used DEC Basic, I 
> > had forgotten about them until you brought them up. 
> > 
> > Did they exist back in the V4 days when David started writing his code ?
> VAX/VMS V3.x BASIC apps usually used integers, and used numeric strings 
> via the VAX/VMS RTLs. 
> 
> At that time (IIRC), the VAX decimal instructions were only "exposed" 
> in COBOL and MACRO-32. And IIRC from the era of the OpenVMS port to 
> Alpha, it was still only COBOL and MACRO-32. 
> 
VAX BLISS also has packed decimal builtins.  Not moved forward.

The packed decimal "instructions" (actually macros that expand to
library routine calls in STARLET.OLB, written in Macro-32 of course) 
work just fine on Macro-32 on x86.

For COBOL, the visible behavior is the same.  For certain intermediates,
it uses a B100 (base100 packed format) on Itanium, but we went with
128-bit integers on x86.  Easier to pass around and has more than enough
digits.