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.