Re: [boost] Re: Any interest in a decimal and money class?

From: Beman Dawes (bdawes_at_[hidden])
Date: 2005-01-08 22:23:24

At 06:54 PM 1/8/2005, Stefan Slapeta wrote:
 >Beman Dawes wrote:
 >
 >[...]
 >
 >> With the C and C++ committee's working on a decimal arithmetic 
technical
 >> report, have you considered how your library will support future 
decimal
 >> types that come out of that effort? Since at least one major vendor
 >> (IBM) apparently intends to support the proposed decimal types in
 >> hardware, the new types may be a lot faster on some platforms than
 >> decimal types which do not have hardware support.
 >>
 >
 >Beman,
 >
 >wasn't it you who recently asked for clarification about the IBM
 >licencing for decimal? The one and only currently available
 >implementation of the proposed decimal interface is a library that you
 >can use for about $3000. This totally conflits with everything what I've
 >ever heard about standardization, as it's IMHO very difficult to write
 >anything that meets the same interface requirements and doesn't conflict
 >with the current implementation!

I asked on one of the committee reflectors, and the response was that the 
library IBM licenses isn't what is being standardized, so there is no 
issue. For C, what will be standardized are built-in data types, not a 
library. For C++, what will be standardized may be a library, but it will 
be designed for C++.

 >...
 >However, I'm really angry about the dog and pony show to adopt a
 >datatype that goes without saying in other programming languagues.

Sorry, I'm having trouble understanding your meaning. Are you saying in 
effect that decimal types should have be standardized in C and C++ a long 
time ago?

--Beman