On Sat, 23 Jan 2021 22:54:30 -0000 (UTC), Martin Gregorie
 declaimed the following:

>The Mainframes I've worked on have ALWAYS used integers for financial
>values, though quite a lot of the weedier bottom-of-the-range IBM boxes
>used BCD - but at least they had BCD hardware and didn't have to do
>calculations entirely in software.

 Even the old Intel 8080a had "BCD hardware" -- but one would have to
write the algorithm to work with more than two BCD digits.

 My college computer (Xerox Sigma-6) had BCD hardware. The normal mode
used by the COBOL class was BCD (note: Sigma's also used the EBCDIC
character encoding), 32-digit, using four of the 32-bit general purpose
registers at a time. I recall the fall when the BCD board failed -- COBOL
students were left twiddling their thumbs or trying to code work-arounds
(possibly one of the COMP formats that did not use BCD), whereas the
FORTRAN-IV students were not impacted. Think it took almost half the term
before the BCD board was replaced.


--
 Wulfraed                 Dennis Lee Bieber         AF6VN
 wlfraed@ix.netcom.com    http://wlfraed.microdiversity.freeddns.org/

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