Remind me again

Why is floating point arithmetic better than BCD arithmetic? The latter can be implemented in hardware just fine and is perfectly accurate.

>>1
computers are based on bits, idiot

seriously what the fuck happened here with all these new retards? is this place #1 on r/programming or something?

BCD and normal binary are both integer representations; either can be used for floating point (which is just a special type composed of two integers - a number and an exponent). But BCD is inefficient - since everything is based on bits, a BCD digit needs 4 bits (16 possibiities), with 6 possibilities wasted - and you need more bytes to store a BCD value than you would if it was plain binary.

>>1

The latter can be implemented in hardware

so can floating point arithmetic

>>1
What's the one have to do with the other?

Check wm