Decimal arithmetic

[Paul Leyland]

On Wed, 2007-04-04 at 18:31, Linas Vepstas wrote:

> FWIW, some history of base-10:
> -- IBM mainframes have supported base-10 arithmetic since the 1960's.
>    This was primarily to support accounting, in order to make life
>    easier for banks and utilities and anyone who sent out zillions
>    of invoices every month.
> 
> -- This base-10 arith has been backwards-compat supported all those
>    decades, and is now making its debut on a modern CPU, the Power6
>    due to ship "any day now". As a result, base-10 arithmetic support
>    was proposed to ANSI as a libc or libm math standard, and I beleive
>    the standard was recently (last year or two) accepted.
> 
> -- I don't beleive that it is widely supported in general. The only
>    hardware support will be on power6, so I don't see much point in 
>    doing base-10 aritmetic on anything other than that. 

I was doing decimal arithmetic on a Z80 in assembly language over 25
years ago.  Some skillful use of Google will unearth supporting evidence
for this claim. (Further hints on request.)

As far as I know the Z80 is still in widespread use though, I concede,
very rarely as a compute engine these days.


Paul

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