Re: [Haskell-cafe] What is a safe Haskell data type to store and manipulate Money values?

On 5/04/2017, at 5:08 PM, Joachim Durchholz wrote:

What languages besides Cobol actually make use of [decimal floats]?

Aside from obvious things like PL/I and ABAP, there is an official way to use decimal floats in C, if you have them. gcc is *part* of the way there. https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc/Decimal-Float.html Having used gcc on a machine with no hardware binary floats, where binary floats were emulated, I'd rather like to use decimal floats on my Macs. However gcc 5.3.0 on my laptop *recognises* decimal floats but just says that it's not supported on this target. The decNumber library's licences are perfectly compatible with gcc. Solaris Studio supports decimal floats on SPARCX[+] processors, for some value of "support" strictly between 0 and 1. (It knows the _Decimal64 type but you have to call special intrinsics to get the arithmetic instructions, though you _do_ get them.)

Are there any plans by Intel or AMD to support them? I'm not aware of any, but you never know.

Perhaps if Microsoft realised that _Decimal128 is exactly what they want for Excel, and put pressure on Intel? Intel do provide a decimal floating point *library* https://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/intel-decimal-floating-point-math-... http://www.netlib.org/misc/intel/ so in *some* sense they already support decimal floats. The date in the README file is "August 15, 2011", so we've had an "official" decimal floating point library for Intel systems for nearly 8 years (first release in 2009). [Amusingly, the only difference between LIBRARY/RUNOSX and LIBRARY/RUNLINUX is that the OSX version has a space after "./linuxbuild".] The code is in C and has support for big-endian machines, and eula.txt is very permissive, so it looks very much as though nobody needs to go without.