prePEP: Money data type

[John Roth]

"Dennis Lee Bieber" <wlfraed at ix.netcom.com> wrote in message
news:obf861-0e3.ln1 at beastie.ix.netcom.com...
> John Roth fed this fish to the penguins on Saturday 18 October 2003
> 08:51 am:
>
> >
> > [2] Unless that would run you over 18 digits. Why 18, I
> > have no idea, and I'm afraid that most of the people on the
> > original COBOL committee are no longer with us.
> >
>         Is that 18 /after/ the decimal, or 18 in total?

18 in total. I'm sure that one of the other poster's comment about
machines with 36 bit words was correct. It caused quite a bit
of difficulty since IBM's mainframes only handled 15 digits of
precision in the native decimal arithmetic. The compilers could
handle 18, but they had to use inline multiple precision routines to
do it.

John Roth