Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!lll-tis!helios.ee.lbl.gov!pasteur!ucbvax!decwrl!sun!aeras!elxsi!beatnix!murphy From: murphy@beatnix.UUCP (Michael Murphy) Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: Ada decimal elaboration, further experimentation. Message-ID: <835@elxsi.UUCP> Date: 5 Jul 88 23:39:35 GMT References: <8807031845.AA01533@ajpo.sei.cmu.edu> <7576@boring.cwi.nl> Sender: news@elxsi.UUCP Reply-To: murphy@beatnix.UUCP (Michael Murphy) Organization: ELXSI Super Computers, San Jose Lines: 10 The more serious problem here which is what *really* causes the bad numbers is that most (all?) Ada compilers only support fixed point numbers that are a power of two. So despite the type declaration with a delta of 0.01, the actual delta used is 0.0078125 (2e-7). This makes decimal arithmetic using fixed point unworkable. -- Michael Murphy P.S. The VADS 5.5 compiler for the ELXSI prints out 0.10 for all my_dime calculations (constant or not) because they are all done with universal arithmetic, but your_dime is 0.08 for the above reason.