On 2023-02-17, Richard Damon <rich...@damon-family.org> wrote: > [...] > >> Perhaps this observation should be brought to the attention of the IEEE. I >> would like to know their response to it. > > That is why they have developed the Decimal Floating point format, to > handle people with those sorts of problems. > > They just aren't common enough for many things to have adopted the > use of it.
Back before hardware floating point was common, support for deciaml floating point was very common. All of the popular C, Pascal, and BASIC compilers (for microcomputers) I remember let you choose (at compile time) whether you wanted to use binary floating point or decimal (BCD) floating point. People doing scientific stuff usually chose binary because it was a little faster and you got more resolution for the same amount of stoage. If you were doing accounting, you chose BCD (or used fixed-point). Once hardware (binary) floating point became common, support for software BCD floating point just sort of went away... -- Grant -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list