On Sat, 27 Feb 2016 17:32:19 -0500 Paul Koning <[email protected]> wrote:
> Decimal did show up at times even into the 1960s, for example in the IBM > 1620. But it never made all that much sense; converting between binary > and decimal is quite easy even in those very old machines. The one > plausible application area is business data processing where the > arithmetic is trivial and most of the work is I/O or other non-arithmetic > operations. IBM S/360 (1964) and follow-ons have all had hardware support for decimal and COBOL and PL/I on these platforms have always had native suport for the data type. As you might expect decimal arithmetic is used extensively in financial transactions and reporting since there is no problem of conversion. Money can be represented exactly rather than approximately as with floating point. Most banks still run their financial transactions on IBM hardware and OS for that reason among others. _______________________________________________ Simh mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.trailing-edge.com/mailman/listinfo/simh
