Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!rutgers!sri-unix!quintus!ok From: ok@quintus.UUCP (Richard A. O'Keefe) Newsgroups: comp.arch Subject: Re: Brain-Clogging Decimal Summary: 386; Burroughs Message-ID: <459@cresswell.quintus.UUCP> Date: 11 Dec 87 06:01:19 GMT References: <6901@apple.UUCP> <15782@watmath.waterloo.edu> <1083@winchester.UUCP> Organization: Quintus Computer Systems, Mountain View, CA Lines: 17 The Intel 80386 is a pretty recent machine. It still has instructions to support decimal arithmetic: AAA, AAD, AAM, AAS, DAA, DAS. Of course this is to keep all those 8086 programs in the air... I saw a paper years ago from somebody at Burroughs explaining some of the decisions they had made for the B6700. That was explicitly designed to run Algol, Fortran, and COBOL. It did a reasonable job of PL/I and PASCAL as well, but didn't make a good Lisp machine. They were very much concerned to support COBOL well. They decided that the best thing was to leave out decimal arithmetic entirely, but to provide fast binary<->decimal conversion and decimal scaling. This seems like the right decision for any machine: even C programmers want binary<->decimal conversion and have no objection to it being fast, and even COBOL has USAGE COMPUTATIONAL.