(j3.2006) decimal floats

[Keith Bierman]

On Jan 12, 2008, at 12:21 PM, Andy Vaught wrote:

> On Sat, 12 Jan 2008, Andy Vaught wrote:

Many wise words .... elided...

I concur with the implicit conversion being consistent with Fortran's  
general heritage and style (not that it's necessarily a GoodThing but  
that's a different question :>)
> ....  Having given some more thought to this, I think the real  
> insanity is a
> chip that does floating point in two different radices.  If someone  
> wants
> to m

Clearly any system striving to be compatible with an existing user  
base (viz. any system likely to be successful) is going to have to  
keep the old format around (perhaps indefinitely). The IBM zSeries as  
an example (traditional hexadecimal fp, IEEE fp as well as  
decimal ;>). So I don't think characterizing a two radix chip (or  
system, why the number of chips is relevant to the discussion eludes  
me) as insane is reasonable.



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Keith H. Bierman   khbkhb at gmail.com      | AIM kbiermank
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