forwardcom forum

Hi Agner – Have you considered instructions for decimal floating point? As you know, I really don't like binary floating point and the problems it causes, including those you listed in your last thread. Some interesting papers on hardware support for decimal floating point:

Mike Cowlishaw got it into IBM's modern Power architectures: https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/8351/d ... 9adc77.pdf

Decimal floating point futurism: http://www.silminds.com/dl/Decimal-Floa ... essors.pdf

An interesting decimal floating point divider: https://link.springer.com/article/10.10 ... 007-0058-5

I prefer computers to use binary numbers. This is more efficient. The standards for decimal floating point numbers are certainly not easier to deal with than binary.

It only really makes sense for financial applications, no?

Why would a financial application need decimal floating point? You can get exactness just by multiplying by 100 so that you are counting cents rather than $ or € or whatever.

BTW, the x86 instruction set has instructions for decimal numbers but they were never used, so they have been removed in x86-64.