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From: broman@cod.NOSC.MIL (Vincent P. Broman)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: More on Ada and decimal
Message-ID: <1143@cod.NOSC.MIL>
Date: 2 Jul 88 21:08:01 GMT
References: <8806301350.AA05872@bx.sei.cmu.edu>
Reply-To: broman@cod.nosc.mil.UUCP (Vincent P. Broman)
Organization: Naval Ocean Systems Center, San Diego
List-Id: <comp.lang.ada>

In article <8806301350.AA05872@bx.sei.cmu.edu> Marc.Graham@SEI.CMU.EDU writes:
>The advantages of decimal hardware are twofold:
>
>1. Decimal hardware typically allows for computations on much larger
>numbers than the binary (fixed point) hardware; e.g. 10**31 as
>contrasted to 2**32;

I find it hard to conceive of a commercial application (aside from
public-key encryption) which would require more than the 64 bit
integers supported by VAXes and PCs with i8087s.  Many systems such
as Unix support infinite precision arithmetic in software.
In any case, point 2 below casts doubt on the relevance of point 1.

>2. It eliminates the necessity to convert between binary and decimal
>representations. If the commonly held view of commercial applications,
>little calculation and lots of io, is accurate, then the savings in
>conversion costs outweigh the loss in compute speed. 

The "lots of I/O" in commercial applications is mostly unformatted
I/O accessing databases, not formatted printing of account balances.

Vincent Broman,  code 632, Naval Ocean Systems Center, San Diego, CA 92152, USA
Phone: +1 619 553 1641    Internet: broman@nosc.mil   Uucp: sdcsvax!nosc!broman