23 Oct
2011
23 Oct
'11
4:25 p.m.
On Oct 23, 2011, at 4:25 PM, Fred Cisin wrote:
On Sun, 23 Oct 2011, Tony Duell wrote:
Which is part of why VisiCalc appeared on the Apple II first; the 6502 had a built-in
"decimal" mode which did the calculations in BCD, which was a huge boon for
business calculations. I seem to recall the full POWER instruction set (not the subset
used on PowerPC) has a number of decimal operations as well.
- Dave
There probably is a need for an
'engineer's spreadsheet' with proper
complex number support, but I guess the market is much less than for
'business' applicatiosn which only need real numbers.
In many cases, "REAL" (actually "floating point") numbers are
inappropriate. For MONEY, I tried to get my students to use ints (and
calculate the pennies not the dollars), and then just move the PERIOD
when they display the results.