[Python-ideas] Consider generalizing Decimal to support arbitrary radix

[Greg Ewing]

Mark Dickinson wrote:

> And base-16 floating-point is still used in current IBM hardware, but I
> don't know whether that's purely for historical/backwards-compatibility
> reasons, or because it's faster for the FPU.

Historically, base 16 was used to get a bigger exponent
range for a given number of exponent bits. That was a
bigger deal back when memory was very expensive. I doubt
there's any advantage in it now.

-- 
Greg