OpenEuphoria

Re: BUG! Erratic for loop behavior

• Posted by petelomax at blueyonder.co.uk Mar 24, 2002
• 475 views

On Sun, 24 Mar 2002 16:45:00 +0000, Chris Bensler <bensler at mail.com>
wrote:

>This seems like a devastating problem. We use fractional numbers all the 
>time. How is it possible that it doesn't show up more often?
>
>Do we need to resort to binary math? Would that even help?
>
>What can be done to ensure that my program is calculating the math 
>properly?
>
See http://www2.hursley.ibm.com/decimal/

I think that's what is needed, There is even some C code there.
It is IEEE854 rather than IEEE754.

What does everyone else think?

I should specifically mention the following extracts:

Complaints about the performance of decimal arithmetic are extremely
common. Software emulation is 100 to 1000 times slower than a hardware
implementation could be. 

For example, a JIT-compiled 9-digit BigDecimal division in Java takes
over 13,000 clock cycles on an Intel Pentium. Even a simple 9-digit
decimal addition takes at least 1,100 clock cycles. In contrast, a
native hardware decimal type could reduce this to a speed comparable
to binary arithmetic (39 cycles). 

Almost all major IBM language products support decimal arithmetic,
including C (as a native data type, on z900), C++ (via libraries),
COBOL, Java (through the Sun or IBM BigDecimal class), OS/400 CL,
PL/I, PL/X (on AS/400), NetRexx, PSM (in DB2), Rexx, Object Rexx, RPG,
and VisualAge Generator. Many other languages also support decimal
arithmetic, including Microsoft’s Visual Basic and C# languages (both
of which provide a floating-point decimal arithmetic using the .Net
runtime Decimal class). 

Pete