Re: [f-cpu] Re: Floating-Point?

[Yann Guidon <whygee@f-cpu.org>]

hi,

Ben Franchuk wrote:
> Hans Summers wrote:
> > I've spent the last 7 years writing financial applications, and have NEVER
> > seen or heard of BCD arithmetic being used. I always use 64-bit
> > representation mostly because it is most standard. Yes, you will get
> > rounding errors but you need a heck of a lot of calculations for the
> > rounding errors in the 16'th decimal place to add up to anything of any
> > significance.
> 
> I suspect most programs that do acounting and other stuff for small
> financial applications ended up being written in languages that did not
> support decimal format.Note many database style languages may calculate
> in decimal character data. Not too long ago floating point was 32 bit math
> still done in software on 386's. 64/80 bit math was not a
> option back then. Ben.

the 8087 was one of the first 80-bit IEEE computing chips.
with a 80387, you could do 64-bit quite quickly.

> PS. Any idea when you web page will be back on line ,Hans?
i have redirected the webring to one subpage of his site,
http://www.hanssummers.com/computers/fcpu/scheduler.htm
where he has put the appropriate links.
before he posted this URL, his page was deactivated from the ring.
thanks for the update.

WHYGEE
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