Bill Birrell wrote in a message to Winston Smith:

 BB> Winston,

 > Such a bizarre design does not make much sense unless the designers 
 > were trying to directly accomodate the decimal Hollerith card 
 > punching machines and the BCD decimal Hollerith Census data....

 BB>     Since you have already conceded that ForTran preceded the IBM
 BB> 360, I do not see why this is important. The American Standard Code
 BB> has largely superseded EBCD. BCD had its uses for computation of
 BB> financial transactions where floating point was not precise enough,
 BB> but it had to be expanded to cope with real teletypes, as opposed
 BB> to electric adding machines. 

Speaking of BCD math...

I've not looked at this issue much lately.  I remember that Mix Power C had
a library you could use that would _replace_ the floating point stuff (an
approach I was not too happy with),  and I was wondering what might be
do-able with regard to this sort of math under other compilers.  I have
here MSC6, and TC I think 2.5,  as well as whatever the current release of
Slackware is giving me.

Anybody know if BCD is do-able with any of those?  In particular the last one?

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