Status of Decimal Floating Point Module

[Paul D. Anderson]

There have been a couple of mentions of the decimal module lately 
so I thought I'd bring everyone up to speed. The short version is 
that it's probably at an alpha stage of development. If anyone 
wants to download it and try it out I'd appreciate the feedback. 
See below.

The software is an implementation of the General Decimal 
Arithmetic Specification 
(http://speleotrove.com/decimal/decarith.pdf)

Current Status:

Support for 4 different decimal types:
1) decimal32
2) decimal64
3) decimal128
4) "big" decimal -- arbitrary precision, but user must specify 
max coefficient and max exponent.

Support for all rounding modes called out in the specification.

Support for all arithmetic operations called out in the 
specification.

Notes:

I just finished implementing the decimal128 type. This was the 
last major hurdle. (It required an integer128 type so if you're 
interested that is also available, but only an unsigned version 
is working.)

The remaining work is cleanup, improving tests, improving docs, 
working through the "TODO"s, improving the exp, log and power 
functions, and implementing trig functions (which is a good test 
of basic arithmetic).

Feel free to download it from 
https://github.com/andersonpd/decimal and try it out.

I'll be happy to discuss the design, implementation, or anything 
else about it either here in this forum or offline by e-mail.

Paul