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). ------Original Message------ From: Fred Cisin Sender: cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts ReplyTo: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts Subject: Re: Fixed point financial data versus floating point - Re: Spreadsheets (was Microsoft flamage) Sent: 24 Oct 2011 19:11 On Mon, 24 Oct 2011, Vintage Coder wrote: Although with a radix of 10, which MAKES SENSE for financial, I still think of that as being scaled integers. It is not an exponential structure like the IEEE Floating Point Representation Standard.