"Richard A. O'Keefe" <ok at cs.otago.ac.nz> wrote:
> What I'd really like to get my hands on is the decimal floating-point
> arithmetic in the revised IEEE standard.  *That's* the arithmetic you
> want for a spreadsheet.  That's the arithmetic you want if people are
> not to be tripped up by base 2 -vs- base 10.  In fact you *can* get
> your hands on a software implementation if you know where to look, but
> wouldn't it be nice to have it going at full hardware speed?

Does anyone know of a decimal floating point implementation for
Smalltalk?

It would be fun to play with a system that uses decimal floats by
default.  It would seem especially appropriate for Squeak, because
Squeak is supposed to be friendly to kids and novices.

It would still be good to have binary floats for speed, but the compiler
could give you decimal floats by default.  1.1 could give you decimal,
and 1.1e could give you binary.

If there's no good decimal float library around, maybe we could try
"1.1" giving you a 10-decimal ScaledDecimal.

-Lex