Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!henry From: henry@utzoo.UUCP (Henry Spencer) Newsgroups: net.lang.c Subject: Re: Accountants, Finance, Language Message-ID: <4721@utzoo.UUCP> Date: Mon, 3-Dec-84 13:09:51 EST Article-I.D.: utzoo.4721 Posted: Mon Dec 3 13:09:51 1984 Date-Received: Mon, 3-Dec-84 13:09:51 EST References: <62@vax2.fluke.UUCP>, <252@desint.UUCP> Organization: U of Toronto Zoology Lines: 39 > ... I hate to break it to you, but as was pointed out on the > net a week and a half ago, the financial people have heard of binary, and long > ago. They use it when it's appropriate. They don't when it's not. You mean, they use it when their preconceptions say it's appropriate, and scorn it when their preconceptions say it's not. Last I heard, business types using the big Burroughs machines don't seem to mind that there is no BCD on the machine at all, and their COBOL compilers are doing all the arithmetic in binary. > ... The original article was pointing > out that BCD is the optimum representation for a lot of types (a point > which has yet to be successfully rebutted by the know-it-alls) and such a > type might be useful in C. The original article was *claiming* that BCD is the optimum representation; most of us think the case made for it is so poor that it's hardly worth trying to rebut. There are many things that might be useful in C. Far too many. > Contrary to popular belief, the financial > community has developed one or two things that have found their way into what > egotists would like to think is "mainstream" computer science. When I got > my degree, database was a joke. It certainly isn't today. So what does this have to do with BCD? When I got *my* degrees, BCD was a joke. It still is. > A lot of modern databases (e.g., Ingres, Unify) are written in C. And they > have to manipulate financial data types in an efficient representation. A > BCD type (or at least a standard BCD subroutine package) would help them a lot. A standard extended-precision-integer package would probably suffice, and whether it used BCD or binary representation would be (and should be!) an irrelevant implementation decision. -- Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology {allegra,ihnp4,linus,decvax}!utzoo!henry