So I've been looking at using REAL_TYPE to represent decimal floating
point values internally (to implement the C extensions for decimal floating point.) I believe David and yourself had some discussions on this some short time back.
FWIW, I'd rather see you stick with REAL_TYPE. I think that decimal floating point is similar enough to binary floating point to make that worthwhile.
What I would hope would work would be modifying real.c to (a) directly suport the decimal format for storage, and (b) update the emulation of floating-point operations to work correctly on the decimal format. I definitely agree that translating into the binary format is likely to result in various errors.
I don't have an opinion on exactly what method of modifying real.c would be cleanest.
-- Mark Mitchell CodeSourcery, LLC [EMAIL PROTECTED] (916) 791-8304
