Olin Lathrop wrote: > 'William Chops" Westfield ' > IIRC, COBOL has BCD data types. Or a decimal data type usually >> implemented as BCD. Or something. It allows the language to do >> "exact" operations on quantities of money, where the business types >> apparently don't trust the vague inexactness of floating point. >=20 > That's a argument for integer versus floating point, not for a BCD > representation of that integer in particular. What you really need > is extra wide integer support. 32 bits is not enough dynamic range > when in units of cents. Not really. While under certain conditions both can have the same effect, they address different issues. With decimal floating-point you get floating-point without the in/out conversion issues between decimal and binary representations of floating-point numbers. With integers you get a binary fixed-point representation -- which is a different thing. (FWIW, the almost universally used floating point format spec IEEE 754 contains both binary and decimal formats. GCC for example has support for decimal floats. So has the IBM System z mainframe :) Gerhard --=20 http://www.piclist.com PIC/SX FAQ & list archive View/change your membership options at http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist .