Re: Prolegomena to any future decimal discussion

[Ivan Godard <igodard@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

This comment begs *major* architectural questions, because it assumes 
the existence of dedicated non-memory-format FP registers and indeed a 
of a load/store architecture in general. This assumption precludes most 
of the current research architectures for high-performance computation, 
including flow machines, computation-in-memory approaches, bit-serial 
computation, most grid machines, and so on, and even would cause trouble 
for such traditional architectures as vector and VLIW.

We standardize an approach that assumes (nay requires)  legacy hardware 
at our peril.

Ivan

John R Harrison wrote:
> <snip
>
> Similar remarks apply to hardware based on millennial digits or pure
> binary, but once again the difference between DPD and ZBD is not
> dramatic because the conversion cost in hardware is not very large
> and need apply only to loads and stores.
>
> <snip>
>