dec64 decimal floating point type

[Francesco Cattoglio]

On Sunday, 13 April 2014 at 18:42:43 UTC, Alix Pexton wrote:
> The talk I watched only touched on the motivation for a new 
> format very briefly, but the gist was that the existing 
> offerings were too computationally expensive to emulate in 
> software and hardware support is not forthcoming. My 
> understanding is that this format is designed around what can 
> be done efficiently with the instructions that are available in 
> hardware today.
>
> A...

This would make sense, at least partially, if hardware supporting 
the ieee was non-existant, but apparently hardware support for 
the decimal64 standard is already here!

Being a numerical analyst I can say I'm extremely interested when 
someone comes up with new interesting ideas, but as far as I can 
tell we still need to go down a long road before finding 
something better than good old floats. And I really think that 
one should stick to the standards, as long as the standard is 
good enough.

On a side note, I think that support for decimal64 might be 
something nice to have in the D language, because apparently that 
one is the most used floating point type in the economic sectors.