Re: What about big integers in Ada 2005?

[clubley@remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP (Simon Clubley)]

In article <wccmzlpclgd.fsf@shell01.TheWorld.com>, Robert A Duff <bobduff@shell01.TheWorld.com> writes:
> clubley@remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP (Simon Clubley) writes:
> 
>> In article <1x4pe4pv41qsn$.m5c5jawjqcpq.dlg@40tude.net>, "Dmitry A. Kazakov" <mailbox@dmitry-kazakov.de> writes:
>> > 
>> > Curious, why somebody would like to use BCD for 45!? I cannot imagine any
>> > use of BCD except than to speed up conversions to ASCII, which is not an
>> > issue in these days.
>> 
>> One reason to use BCD is because it's a compact data representation.
> 
> Heh?  Binary is more compact that BCD.
> 

Oops, bad choice of wording on my part. When I wrote that, I thinking of
the telephone number example (I've just written code to generate SMS TPDU
packets), and was not thinking of encoding a full size integer.

(SMS packs 2 telephone digits into a single octet in order to reduce
the size of the packet.)

> I think the only reason to use BCD these days (instead of binary) is to
> interface to something that uses BCD.  In the old days, another reason
> was to avoid the cost of converting strings to binary integers and
> vice-versa, but that seems like an obsolete reason at this 
> 
> Am I right?

How would you choose to implement big number packages ?

Simon.

-- 
Simon Clubley, clubley@remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP       
Microsoft: The Standard Oil Company of the 21st century