RFA; DFP and REAL_TYPE?

[Robert Dewar]

Mark Mitchell wrote:

> I would expect that some decimal floating point values are not precisely 
> representable in the binary format.

OK, I agree that decimal floating-point needs its own format. But still
you can store the decimal mantissa and decimal exponent in binary format
without any problem, and that's probably what you want to do on a machine
that does not have native decimal format support. Even on a machine that
does have some support for decimal formats or arithmetic, you want to
check timing to see if these instructions are actually attractive to use.