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From: geoff@desint.UUCP (Geoff Kuenning)
Newsgroups: net.lang.c
Subject: Re: C needs BCD -- why BCD?  Accountants!
Message-ID: <241@desint.UUCP>
Date: Sat, 24-Nov-84 01:24:42 EST
Article-I.D.: desint.241
Posted: Sat Nov 24 01:24:42 1984
Date-Received: Sun, 25-Nov-84 02:43:37 EST
References: <105@ISM780B.UUCP> <869@ihuxn.UUCP> <904@umcp-cs.UUCP> <4611@utzoo.UUCP> <222@desint.UUCP> <161@harvard.ARPA>
Organization: his home computer, Manhattan Beach, CA
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In article <161@harvard.ARPA> breuel@harvard.ARPA (Thomas M. Breuel) writes:

>As soon as I/O gets involved, it hardly matters which one is faster
>computationally. BTW, you can do conversions using shifts and (sorry
>to say that) BCD arithmetic... but you can write that in assembly
>language.

A Fujitsu Eagle transfers data at about 1.8 megabytes per second.  Many
mainframe disks are even faster.  If you are storing 6-byte (12-digit) BCD
and are adding two streams, you are transferring 18 bytes per operation.
Assuming you double-buffer but have only one controller, this is 100K
operations per second.  You thus have to convert to binary, add, and
convert back to BCD in approximately 10 microseconds.

I am perfectly aware that multiplications can be done with shifts and adds.
Indeed, that's how hardware multipliers work.  But I have never seen an
algorithm for converting binary to decimal without doing divisions.  It is
pretty hard to do 12 digits' worth of binary-to-decimal conversion in 10
microseconds on most machines (though possible on a modern
mainframe--right, Gordon?).  But a 12-digit BCD add can be pretty easy.
And it's actually worse than that, because a mainframe that powerful
typically has several controllers so that the full 1.8 megabyte output data
rate could be maintained if the CPU could keep up with it.
-- 

	Geoff Kuenning
	...!ihnp4!trwrb!desint!geoff