1 Nov
2004
1 Nov
'04
10:40 a.m.
"Mark Rogers" mark@quarella.co.uk writes:
However, I'm still not clear on the specific connection with fractional numbers. BCD to me is just a different way of representing decimal integers (and at its simplest means internal instructions which allow incrementing 9 to result in 16(dec) = 10(hex)). Maybe I'm looking too hard...
I believe the original point was that you could use decimal floating point instead of binary floating point, and thus avoid surprising answers when converted back to decimal for display. 4-bits-per-digit BCD is one way of doing that but not the only way.
It looks like decimal floating point may be better supported in the future, see e.g. http://www2.hursley.ibm.com/decimal/