I don't know why the downvotes since it's an interesting tidbit of info... but looking at the Wikipedia page, it's not that you are legally required to do all o

I don't know why the downvotes since it's an interesting tidbit of info... but looking at the Wikipedia page, it's not that you are legally required to do all of your processing using the IBM hex format in your floating point calculations, it's just that when you submit your data set to the FDA the file format they specify uses the IBM hex floating point format as the data type for one of the fields. So you can convert at submission time (and, indeed, it looks like the FDA even provides code to help you convert if the data isn't coming from a mainframe with native support for the format). And the other examples under Special Uses... like the GRIB data, I have toyed with reading weather model data and I just write Go code that reads the files and does conversions as necessary on x86 without having to involve a mainframe. (Although that said, I have an odd fascination with mainframes despite never using them professionally, and maintain a system using the Hercules emulator and the MVS 3.8 operating system, which was the last freely-available version of what became today's z/OS.)