Do you have a source for “they could have designed a base 10 floating point unit, as recommended by Kahan”? It is not in the article being discussed (only one o

Do you have a source for “they could have designed a base 10 floating point unit, as recommended by Kahan”? It is not in the article being discussed (only one occurrence of “decimal”), and I have a hard time believing that Kahan didn't believe that binary was the superior base and should be implemented first (and is so efficient that it should be implemented even if one builds a decimal system too). Simulations of physical systems, for instance, do not care about the base. Base-2 offers the smoother relative precision, and a very simple system to save on the first digit (do not store it). In fact, I seem to remember a Kahan article saying that binary was superior to all other bases that could be considered for floating-point.