Numeric Precision and Range

PRO/5 guarantees real decimal arithmetic as opposed to the more common binary arithmetic. Values like 0.1 or 0.01 cannot be precisely represented in binary. Business applications require that 100 pennies equal 1 dollar. Because of this, PRO/5 might not make use of some special math hardware available with some systems, if that hardware works only in binary mode. PRO/5 may choose to represent some floating-point numerical values internally as 32-bit integers for performance reasons. However, this is invisible to the programmer and PRO/5 will automatically convert between integer and floating point as necessary.

A precision of 16 decimal digits is guaranteed with magnitudes from .1E-63 to .1E+63.

Integer variables are kept as 32-bit binary integers with no overflow checking.