need for binary floats (except performance)?

[Paul Rubin]

kartik_vad at yahoo.com (kartik) writes:
> Since the Decimal type can represent any given fractional number
> exactly,

It can't.  For example, it can't represent 1/3 exactly.

> including all IEEE binary floating-point numbers, wouldn't it be
> advisable to use Decimals for all floating point numbers (except
> possibly for performance)?

The notion has some appeal, though algorithms on binary floats have
been studied a lot over the past several decades, while decimal floats
are not used very much at the moment.  It will get more interesting
if and when we start seeing decimal floating point hardware again.