Decimal floating point

[JoeDuarte]

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

[agner]

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.

[HubertLamontagne]

It only really makes sense for financial applications, no?

[agner]

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.