3 ms·
They have it in COBOL,which uses binary coded decimals to represent the number (1 decimal per nibble) so numbers like 0.3 can be represented without loss of acc
by toolslive 8y ago
They have it in COBOL,which uses binary coded decimals to represent the number (1 decimal per nibble) so numbers like 0.3 can be represented without loss of accuracy. It was abandoned in favour of IEEE754.
- JoeAltmaier 8y agoI think that was a holdover of EBCDIC, an old IBM standard. In fact early IBM machines did BCD in their ALU.
- jandrese 8y agoBCD mode was a popular in a lot of early chips. It's an esoteric feature today, but on 16 bit machines you would blow out the ALU way too easily and get into messy two word math.
- justincormack 8y agox86 still has BCD support, in 32 bit mode http://www.hugi.scene.org/online/coding/hugi%2017%20-%20coaax.htm http://www.hugi.scene.org/online/coding/hugi%2017%20-%20coaa...