4 ms·

I know one of the authors who worked on this; he described it as "decimal floating" because he insisted "there's no point". Seems he was right: even IBM didn't

I know one of the authors who worked on this; he described it as "decimal floating" because he insisted "there's no point". Seems he was right: even IBM didn't do a hardware implementation after Power 6 IIRC.

macdice 7y ago
Seems useful to me. Fixed sized data is very convenient for computers (fits in a register, pass-by-value), and being able to represent 0.1 and 0.01 is very convenient for humans. The hardware does seem to be of questionable value; I heard rumours that the POWER hardware didn't actually beat the Intel software implementation running on an x86. That doesn't mean that the datatype is worthless. And it sure as hell doesn't mean that this DEC64 type, which has arbitrarily incompatible parameters but adds nothing, and is late to the game, is better!