10E500?

[cyrille de brébisson]

Hello

Quote:BCD floats are much better than binary floats at avoiding rounding errors

Actually untrue... They are just as bad as binary floating points in this respect...

BUT the rounding errors end up in different places which are much easier to understand for human being used to base 10.
For example, we can all understand that 1-3*1/3 = 1e-12 in bcd but we have a hard time understanding why 100-99.99-0.01 = 5e-15 in binary.


As other have stated before, the reason for the +/-499 limit on exponent comes from a long way away...

Althrough it would be in theory easy to change the limit to +/-2 billions, the problem is that not all the algorithms are designed to work with such values.
For example, trigonometric algorithms are absolutely not designed for it and would be relatively hard to modify to do so.

cyrille

Cyrille