Alternative to Decimal type

[Grant Edwards]

On 2008-06-12, Dennis Lee Bieber <wlfraed at ix.netcom.com> wrote:

> If you were to follow the footsteps of COBOL, you'd be using
> BCD internally, with a special code to represent the decimal
> point (and maybe, to save space, the sign too)
>
> Old mainframes had instructions to work with packed BCD as a
> register format (the Xerox Sigma series used four 32-bit
> registers to represent a 31 digit packed BCD number). Okay, I
> think even the Pentium's still have a BCD operation set,

IIRC, most general purpose microprocessors I've used had
special instructions to make packed BCD operations easier, and
back in the day (when Pascal was much more popular than C)
compilers for microprocessors usually offered a BCD floating
point data type.

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