With regard to the need for 128-bit cpus:
Another area that will inevitably demand such data types is the financial
industry. If you use packed BCD (very popular with the "exact"
calculations that CPAs demand) and you want to represent anything under
$100 trillion to the exact cent, you already need 64 bits for the
significant digits, which means the sign nibble pushes you over the
64-bit limit. Budgets (especially national ones) are only going to get
bigger and things like the Euro and conversions between currencies will
make it necessary for the international financial types to go to such
data sizes.
Truett Lee Smith
San Francisco, CA
E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
