Advantage of defining counters as COMP-2

Sweta Saraogi · New User Joined: 07 Feb 2007 Posts: 5 Location: India

will it help the processing, if the counters in a cobol program are defined as comp-2. How?

dick scherrer · Posted: Wed Mar 28, 2007 10:00 pm

Hello,

Probably not.

What kind of counters are these - amounts, quantities, record counts?

What will happen with the counters? Will they be printed or kept in some record(s) for further arithmetic?

For the most part, comp-3 is a good chioce for "counters" or "accumulators".

Sweta Saraogi · New User Joined: 07 Feb 2007 Posts: 5 Location: India

These are record counters not to be displayed or printed anywhere. Just some logic in the program based on this counter like termination of loop etc.

dick scherrer · Posted: Wed Mar 28, 2007 10:28 pm

Hello,

You do not need floating-point fields for simple accumulators. Actually, comp-2 is very rarely used in business applications. Most business functions do not require floating point arithmetic.

Shobana Bhaskar · Posted: Mon Apr 02, 2007 1:40 pm

Hi Dick,

Why and how Comp-3 is good choice for "counters" or "accumulators"??

Thanks

dick scherrer · Posted: Mon Apr 02, 2007 7:33 pm

Hello,

COMP-3 is a good choice because they are easy to use for both calculation and presentation. There are underlying packed-decimal assembler instructions for arithmetic and in order to "edit" output for reporting or on a screen, the "sending" field must be packed-decimal. If the variable definition is not packed-decimal, it must be converted internally to packed-decimal for use anyway.