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From: gillies@p.cs.uiuc.edu
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: Decimal Arithmetic
Message-ID: <76700180@p.cs.uiuc.edu>
Date: 19 Mar 90 17:39:09 GMT
References: <27696@cup.portal.com>
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Nf-ID: #R:cup.portal.com:27696:p.cs.uiuc.edu:76700180:000:957
Nf-From: p.cs.uiuc.edu!gillies    Mar 18 18:42:00 1990


nEven today, maybe we don't know the full intellectual costs of using
binary numbers in computers.  I imagine Von Neumann weighed the
technical advantages, and ignored the human factors.  I imagine he &
his group did not forsee these costs:

(1) Professional programmers must be fluent in 3-4 bases
    (binary, octal/hex, decimal), boolean logic, and arithmetic systems
    (sign-magnitude, one's complement, two's complement).  This is no
    trouble to Von Neumann, but try to teach most high-school kids this.
(2) Numerical algorithms must deal with binary roundoff.
(3) Accounting algorithms must hassle with representing .1 in binary
(4) The industry struggled for years with 6/7-bit characters (too
    little), and finally settled on 8-bit characters (too much).  
    In decimal, 2-digit characters would have made sense on day 1.
(5) The necessity to learn / program conversion algorithms.

Can anyone think of other human costs of binary numbers?