On: Show HN: Single neuron neural network written in COBOL

[im3w1l]

When classifying it's often a good idea to feed the prediction into a sigmoid-function.

I have never seen cobol code before, only heard about it so thanks for posting some. What do rows like "01 ERR PIC S99V9999." mean?

[__palo_alto__ → im3w1l]

I think the perceptron algorithm does not include a sigmoid, just a stepwise activation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perceptron

[atum47 → im3w1l]

ERR is the name of my variable "error" S indicates that this value is signed 99 is two digits V is a decimal separator and the other 9999 are 4 decimal places

http://www.csis.ul.ie/cobol/course/DataDeclaration.htm

[jecel → atum47]

And the 01 at the start of the line is the level number as explained in the link. It is how Cobol declared nested records, which Fortran and Algol lacked but became popular through PL/I, Pascal and C.

[bbunix → im3w1l]

I think 01 line number ERR what you think it means PIC S99V9999 is like a printf format for the number field