Decimal V Binary??

From: Jim Donoghue <jim_at_smithy.com>
Date: Thu Sep 23 06:40:20 2004

On Wed, 2004-09-22 at 22:08, William Donzelli wrote:
> > There are SOME people (I am NOT one) who actually feel that
> > DECIMAL is the right way to go in computers!
>
> If the computers are doing my bank statements, then yes, I am one of them.

I've always wondered what systems/processors (other than IBM mainframes)
that had hardware decimal arithmetic support. I don't mean 'decimal
adjust' instructions, I'm talking about full
add/subtract/multiply/divide/etc. The only other one I know of is the
Wang VS, which came standard with support for 'packed decimal' data, and
even floating-point decimal. The Wang VS instruction set was very
similar to the IBM 360/370, even the packed decimal data format was the
same.

Jim
Received on Thu Sep 23 2004 - 06:40:20 BST