> efficient ways to represent numbers of arbitrary precision I used to write COBOL for Burroughs machines, which had hardware BCD arithmetic. It wasn't "arbitr

> efficient ways to represent numbers of arbitrary precision I used to write COBOL for Burroughs machines, which had hardware BCD arithmetic. It wasn't "arbitrary precision" in the sense that you could input an arbitrary number and get an exact result; you had to allocate storage for each intermediate result, so your program had to be designed to handle some specific amount of precision. I'm sure some Intel microprocessors had BCD hardware; maybe they still do.