> The advantage to floating point math over fixed point is speed. AFAIK this is only because modern CPU's have floating point units (https://en.wikipedia.org/w

> The advantage to floating point math over fixed point is speed. AFAIK this is only because modern CPU's have floating point units (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floating-point_unit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floating-point_unit), from memory these became common on home PCs around the time of the 486. A lot of early 3D games used fixed point because it was much faster for those that didn't have a co-processor installed. Whether any of this is applicable to mainframes I don't know.