Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!watmath!att!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!gem.mps.ohio-state.edu!uwm.edu!rpi!clotho!multics
From: multics@clotho.acm.rpi.edu (Richard Shetron)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc
Subject: Re: Fast conversions, another urban myth?
Message-ID: <1989Sep21.224309.12960@rpi.edu>
Date: 21 Sep 89 22:43:09 GMT
References: <832@dms.UUCP> <688@UALTAVM.BITNET> <9dAz02zs58y201@amdahl.uts.amdahl.com> <27935@winchester.mips.COM> <136@bbxsda.UUCP> <1444@brazos.Rice.edu>
Reply-To: multics@clotho.acm.rpi.edu (Richard Shetron)
Organization: South American Super Beings
Lines: 9


The problem not mentioned is that decimalarithmetic does exist on many
machines in hardware.  In many others there is at least decimal assistance
in the instruction set.  This is one of the problems I'm facing know at work
as I am going to be redoing my companies product in c to get it to
UNIX/XENIX/MS-DOS.  One of the biggest problems I see is getting the math
to work right as it is a business application.  I'd rather use PL/1, but C
is currently the most availible language for an application for many
different machines.  Also all the libraries we plan on using are written in c.