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Comment on An Interview with the Old Man of Floating-Point (1998)parent

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Some complaints should be tempered, some others should be flattened into a bare acknowledgement that floating point is simply the wrong tool for the job, e.g. currency.

IBM implemented IEEE 854 Radix-10 floating point (which later got subsumed back into IEEE 754) back in the System z9 days.

In fact, testing currency handling is the only thing that Bitcoin is actually useful for, LOL. If you take Bitcoin, you get smacked with a lot of fractional digits that break your currency system right away if you didn't do it right.

That's news to me, apparently 754 was updated in 2008 to include base-10 representations. I didn't even know IEEE standards have revisions at all, multiple mind blows here.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_854-1987

Decimal floats are also available in gcc

https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc/Decimal-Float.html

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