Re: More on Ada and decimal

[rick@svedberg.bcm.tmc.edu (Richard H. Miller)]

In article <1143@cod.NOSC.MIL>, broman@cod.NOSC.MIL (Vincent P. Broman) writes:
> 
> 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.

But many of the systems are not 64 bit machines...remember that there are large
number of IBM systems and other systems in which 32 bits are the common size of
integers. Also, most commerical shops will not be using UNIX anytime soon to do
large scale business processing. Also, many of these machines take a much
longer time to execute double word integer arithmatic.


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

But much of the work is involved in the calculations of decimal values. There
is enough of a difference that many of the mainframe architecture provide
explicit architectual support for decimal operations. The cost savings in this
is NOT trivial. Any system which supports business processing needs to support
decimal mode processing



Richard H. Miller                 Email: rick@svedberg.bcm.tmc.edu
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