This math scares me

[jurgen.defurne at philips.com]

If you search the internet for 'Gary Kildall' you will find that he already
had a version of CP/M before the Altair, that he developed together
with Intel.

Jurgen




sdm7g at virginia.edu@SMTP at python.org on 14/03/2001 00:05:03
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To:	grante at visi.com@SMTP
cc:	python-list at python.org@SMTP 
Subject:	Re: This math scares me
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On Tue, 13 Mar 2001, Grant Edwards wrote:

> In article <jwbnews-09D75F.13313313032001 at corp.supernews.com>, John W. Baxter wrote:
> >In article <984518199.127140 at newsmaster-04.atnet.at>,
> > "Werner Schiendl" <ws-news at gmx.at> wrote:
> >
> >Bill Gates got this right in the early days, delivering two
> >Basic interpreters: binary floating point for speed, and
> >decimal floating point for money and such.
>
> I don't know if you can credit Gates with doing anything other
> than following the pack.  Back when I first started doing
> software (CP/M 1.7), all language packages for "personal"
> computers came with both BCD and binary FP math libraries so
> you could do exact monetary calculations if you wanted.

Exactly what pack do you believe Gates was following ?

You do know (don't you?) that Bill's BASIC predates not just
MS-DOS (which microsoft bought from another company) but CP/M
and just about any other "PC" software (and most of the hardware)
since the first version was written to run on the Altair computer --
which was the first microprocessor based personal computer.
( I think you probably had to boost the memory up to 4K to get
  Basic to run. )

> Of course we'd never imagined we'd ever see hardware FP and BCD
> libraries were only marginally slower than binary ones. Now
> that FP is usually in hardware, BCD FP (or fixed point) will be
> pretty slow by comparison.

-- Steve Majewski



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