Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!rutgers!lll-lcc!pyramid!prls!mips!mash
From: mash@mips.UUCP (John Mashey)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: Brain-Clogging Decimal
Message-ID: <1083@winchester.UUCP>
Date: 10 Dec 87 08:29:47 GMT
References: <6901@apple.UUCP> <15782@watmath.waterloo.edu>
Reply-To: mash@winchester.UUCP (John Mashey)
Organization: MIPS Computer Systems, Sunnyvale, CA
Lines: 30

In article <15782@watmath.waterloo.edu> ccplumb@watmath.waterloo.edu (Colin Plumb) writes:
....
>The most recent processor family I know of that still faintly supports
>BCD math is the 68000.....
>Does anyone else have any ideas about COBO* (I can't bring myself to
>say "Langauge") support in architectures?  Is is just hanging on like
>bad smells and MS-DOS, or is it worth anything at all?

HP added some support (described in Allen Baum's posting),
and is probably the only RISC machine to have much of anything
there explicitly for COBOL.

We didn't aim at COBOL with the R2000, but it happens to be pretty good
for it, since loads, stores, branches, and function calls are all fast.
Finally, it turns out that the unaligned-word operations are wonderfully
useful for getting good code for the 100 or so worthwhile low-level
computations and data movements.

[opinion]: Any architecture that wants to be truly widespread better be
reasonable for more than C, Pascal, Modula-2, or FORTH (just to pick
a random example).  Regardless of what anybody thinks of COBOL,
an archiecture has no chance in many quarters if it doesn't
run COBOL at least adequately. [That doesn't mean ahving lots of
decimal operations, just that the performance be OK.]
Ignoring COBOL is almost like ignoring FORTRAN.
-- 
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