Re: Floating Point Approximations.

On Mar 29, 12:42 am, "David Cressey" <cresse..._at_verizon.net> wrote:
>
> Two points on BCD math:

I find BCD rather interesting.

Some years ago, a colleague and I spent some time thinking about BCD formats. In general, I think the term BCD connotes putting one decimal digit into four bits, but I think that usage is not universal.

1 base 10 digit into 4 base 2 digits is wasteful. We can consider putting different numbers of digits into a different number of bytes to minimize the waste. In particular, 3 decimal digits fits nicely into 10 binary digits, and three sets of 10 binary digits fits nicely into a 32 bit word. Thus we can fit 9 digits into 32 bits whereas we could only do 8 digits with standard BCD.

2^10 = 1024
10^3 = 1000

Pretty close.

Another big advantage to BCD is the ease of converting to and from string formats. With 10 bit BCD, the lookup table is 1000 bytes instead of 10 bytes. Although the factor is larger, the total number of bytes is trivial so it doesn't matter. (Total cost of 1000 bytes of RAM = approximately epsilon cents.) (Quick back-of-the-envelope shows it cost more than I thought: approx .00013 dollars.)

Using a larger number of decimal digits at once means that operations are more efficient because they can do more at once. For example, you can convert 3 digits to/from ascii at once instead of 1. You can multiply three digits instead of one. Etc.

An amusing diversion.

Marshall Received on Thu Mar 29 2007 - 19:54:45 CEST