Precision Tail-off?

[Grant Edwards]

On 2023-02-17, Richard Damon <Richard at Damon-Family.org> wrote:
> [...]
>
>> Perhaps this observation should be brought to the attention of the IEEE. I
>> would like to know their response to it.
>
> That is why they have developed the Decimal Floating point format, to 
> handle people with those sorts of problems.
>
> They just aren't common enough for many things to have adopted the
> use of it.

Back before hardware floating point was common, support for deciaml
floating point was very common.  All of the popular C, Pascal, and
BASIC compilers (for microcomputers) I remember let you choose (at
compile time) whether you wanted to use binary floating point or
decimal (BCD) floating point. People doing scientific stuff usually
chose binary because it was a little faster and you got more
resolution for the same amount of stoage. If you were doing
accounting, you chose BCD (or used fixed-point).

Once hardware (binary) floating point became common, support for
software BCD floating point just sort of went away...

--
Grant