24 Oct
2011
24 Oct
'11
12:38 p.m.
On Mon, 24 Oct 2011, Vintage Coder wrote:
Agreed. It's not floating point (no
mantissa/exponent) and the user has
complete control over the decimal point, which is imaginary as far as
the representation goes. There is no decimal point in the data, only
digits and a sign. The name "packed decimal" seems like a safe way to
differentiate it from floating point while giving a hint to the internal
representation (two digits to a byte).
As most everyohne here knows, the 80x85 family has some minimal support
for both packed and unpacked BCD.
But the lack of a widely known data type using those in C and BASIC
results in way too much software being written with inappropriate data
types, such as "float".