Microcode, which is a no-go for modern designs

On Mon, 7 Jan 2019, Johnny Eriksson via cctalk wrote: Interesting bit! Maybe, because remembering the first 80 or 90 digits is half as much work to remember or type in, as that macro. The current state of computer "science" "education" fails to even get the students to understand that floating point is a rounded off approximation. FDIV merely added a small unexpected further degradation to a representation that was already inaccurate, and was explicitly an approximation. They often represent a dollar and cents amount as floating point, just to avoid figuring out how to insert the PERIOD delimiter. Use of FDIV is inappropriate for calculating sales tax. NOT because of the FDIV errors, which are well within the portion that will be discarded in roundoff. It should not take until a third semester "Data Structures And Algorithms" class, or beyond, for them to learn to not use floating point for cash transaction processing. People who use 3.1416 or 22/7 for PI are not in a position to gripe as much as they did, about inaccuracies caused by FDIV. The point was that people were screaming about errors that were already irrelevant to the level of accuracy that they were using, in uses that were explicitly NOT INTENDED to be exact. I am building a base to make a patio table out of a CRASHED 24" RAMAC platter, that had been banged around with no effort to store properly for half a century. (Is there a better use for a CRASHED platter?, or a better way to display it than under glass as a rustic table top?) Neither a value of 3.14 for PI, nor FDIV, will further degrade my level of carpentry skills. I'm considering printing out and including a copy of the RAMAC plaque http://www.ed-thelen.org/RAMAC/RAMAC_Plaque_v40.pdf