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I find it fascinating that something like parsing decimals is not a long-solved problem (and kind of connected was the recent post on emulating the IBM system 3
by dhosek 5y ago
I find it fascinating that something like parsing decimals is not a long-solved problem (and kind of connected was the recent post on emulating the IBM system 360 where decimal parsing was baked into the hardware.
- pvg 5y agoI think it is, for the most part, a long-solved problem and both your example and the article outline it, in a somewhat circuitous and circumscribed way - it's a combination of 'make computers so much faster, it doesn't matter' and 'don't use decimals'. This writeup is about a very specialized case in which they're both using decimals (down to the internal representation) and it's not quite fast enough for their purposes. Every x86 computer, incidentally, still carries vestigial hardware support for BCD. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/33182491/why-bcd-instructions-were-removed-in-amd64 https://stackoverflow.com/questions/33182491/why-bcd-instruc...