On 2021-11-21, Greg Ewing <greg.ew...@canterbury.ac.nz> wrote: > On 21/11/21 2:18 pm, Grant Edwards wrote: >> My recollection is that it was quite common back in the days before FP >> hardware was "a thing" on small computers. CPM and DOS compilers for >> various languages often gave the user a choice between binary FP and >> decimal (BCD) FP. > > It's also very common for handheld calculators to work in decimal. > Most of HP's classic calculators used a CPU that was specifically > designed for doing BCD arithmetic, and many versions of it didn't > even have a way of doing arithmetic in binary!
Yep, IIRC, it was a 4 bit processor because 4 bits is what it takes to represent one decimal digit. The original Intel µProcessor was a also 4-bit processor designed around BCD rather than base-2 arithmatic operations. -- Grant -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
