Re: "A diagram of C23 basic types"

scott@slp53.sl.home (Scott Lurndal) writes:
[...]

But not all decimal floating point implementations used "hex floating point".
>
Burroughs medium systems had BCD floating point - one of the advantages
was that it could exactly represent any floating point number that
could be specified with a 100 digit mantissa and a 2 digit exponent.

BCD uses 4 bits to represent values from 0 to 9.  That's about 83%
efficent relative to pure binary.  (And it still can't represent 1/3.)

Another option (I think IBM has implemented this) is to use 10 bits
to represent values from 0 to 999, taking advantage of the nice
coincidence that 2**10 is barely bigger than 10**3.  That's more
than 99.6% efficient relative to pure binary.  Of course it's still
more complicated to implement.

[...]

--
Keith Thompson (The_Other_Keith) Keith.S.Thompson+u@gmail.com
void Void(void) { Void(); } /* The recursive call of the void */