Re: old instructions, Continuations

According to Scott Lurndal <slp53@pacbell.net>:

I suspect that as compute power grew, the kinds of things we wanted out
of EDIT changed.
>
negative numbers printed in red
negative numbers surrounded with parens (-123.45)
decimal point and comma LOCAL selection
NaN
INFINITY

>
EDIT/EDT instructions were designed from the start for
COBOL fixed point arithmetic.   No Nan, No Infinities.

Yes, but don't forget RPG.  It was never fashionable but
there sure was a lot of it.  Still is on whatever they
call AS/400 aka System i these days.

COBOL had verbs to assign the correct characters as
the decimal point and thousands separator

      DECIMAL POINT IS COMMA.

The problem is that the modern languages don't have
a modern concept of a PICture clause.   An instruction
to format based on a printf-like format string could
be useful, I suspect, but the die area is probably more
useful as cache.

More important, libraries are basically free now. Every program
links to megabytes of shard libraries and nobody cares.




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