Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!rutgers!ames!sdcsvax!ucsdhub!hp-sdd!hplabs!pyramid!prls!mips!hansen
From: hansen@mips.UUCP (Craig Hansen)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: Brain-Clogging Decimal
Message-ID: <1084@mips.UUCP>
Date: 10 Dec 87 17:00:23 GMT
References: <6901@apple.UUCP> <15782@watmath.waterloo.edu> <6958@apple.UUCP>
Lines: 18

>In article <15782@watmath.waterloo.edu> ccplumb@watmath.waterloo.edu (Colin Plumb) writes:
>...the 360/370/whatever architecture isn't
>all that bad. ...
>With the exception, of course, of all the packed decimal divide stuff.

A recent (well, my journal stack is getting deep these days) article in CACM
interviewed two of the IBM architecture folks on the life and times of the
360/370/30xx/43xx series architectures. When asked what they would have done
differently, in hindsight, their top item was "drop the packed decimal
instructions," in that the only justification for having them was that the
8-bit-wide implementation of the 360 did decimal operations significantly
faster with them than without them. The days of 8-bit 360's are long past.

-- 
Craig Hansen
Manager, Architecture Development
MIPS Computer Systems, Inc.
...{ames,decwrl,prls}!mips!hansen or hansen@mips.com