... and most stock markets are also decimalized now. I remember reading the newspaper for my 7th grade investment club run by my math teacher. Prices were in

... and most stock markets are also decimalized now. I remember reading the newspaper for my 7th grade investment club run by my math teacher. Prices were in 1/8ths of a dollar, as I remember, and maybe the penny stocks were in 1/6ths. In an alternate universe where the IEEE-754r decimal formats were in the original IEEE-754 spec, presumably most of these decimal integer operations would be performed in the FPU. If they're common enough, a handful of specialized fast-path instructions could be implemented for cases where it's known a priori that the exponents of the arguments match. Though, as sad is it is that we still use gallons in the US, it is handy that all of the subdivisions of a gallon down to the ounce are powers of two. Alternatively, the Babylonians were more advanced than we generally give them credit, as their base-60 number system isn't intuitive, and yet has lots of small factors for handy fractions. Any fraction storable in a finite number of digits in base-2, base-10, or base-12 (including any integer power of 1/3) is storable in a finite number of digits in base-60. So, a base-60 calculation would result in fewer display issues due to rounding for common calculations in people's everyday lives. Storing one base-60 digit in 6 bits isn't terribly wasteful, though more wasteful than storing 3 base-10 digits in 10 bits.