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It's not exactly secret. Most "big iron" architectures had packed decimal support in the past, and IBM pushed to get decimal floating-point added to IEEE 754-20
by cwzwarich 15y ago
It's not exactly secret. Most "big iron" architectures had packed decimal support in the past, and IBM pushed to get decimal floating-point added to IEEE 754-2008.
- gaius 15y agoWell obviously, since they have a web page about it :-) But "secret" in the sense that not all devs seem to be aware of it yet, if anyone is still using classical floats (or even ints) for handling money.
- ajross 15y agoPacked decimal predates the idea of "big iron" even. The original driver was control applications: doing user output on machines with tiny memories that couldn't spare the conversion logic to produce a decimal value. Check the BCD instructions that still exist (albeit in very slow microcoded form, and I think they still work only on the 8 bit registers) on your 8 core Sandy Bridge monster.