On 2015-06-01, Mark Lawrence <breamore...@yahoo.co.uk> wrote: > On 01/06/2015 18:02, Grant Edwards wrote: >> On 2015-06-01, BartC <b...@freeuk.com> wrote: >> >>> At one time the choice was integer or floating point in many languages, >>> unless you were specifically using a business language such as Cobol. >> >> My recollection in the early days of home computers is that many BASIC >> implementations had BCD floating point instead of binary. Back then >> most CPUs had instructions specifcally for dealing with BCD >> represented with 4-bits per digit. Dunno if they still do, I can't >> even remember the last time I did calculations in BCD. >> >>> I think the Sinclair computer barely had integer types so the choice >>> was even narrower. > > Didn't Turbo C have compiler options to allow either BCD or fp?
Probably. BCD support was pretty widespread in the Pascal compilers I remember for DOS and CP/M. Binary floating point didn't get very popular until HW support for it became more common. -- Grant Edwards grant.b.edwards Yow! Now we can become at alcoholics! gmail.com -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list