Re: Lua workshop: call for backup presentations.

["D Burgess" <dburgess@...>]

At the risk of being shot down in flames (what else is new), I think
the Intel assembler instructions AAM and/or AAS provide the
basis of packed BCD support.
In practice the speed BCD or packed BCD (without hardware support)
is dependent on usage (suprise), addition, substraction, comparison
of a word long BCD is PDQ. Division is a slow.

DB

Dave Dodge wrote:
> Some 1960s IBM mainframes such as the 360 have BCD instructions.  I
> assume its successors such as the 370, 390, and the current zSeries
> have the same instructions for backward compatibility.  I don't know
> if any modern CPUs support BCD for any reason _other_ than backward
> compatibility with old code, though.