Calculators on desktops (was Re: Octal)

[Chuck Guzis]

On 9/2/2006 at 11:01 AM CRC wrote:

>>>> I have never seen a hex number with a decimal point anyway...
>>
>> Nor will you; as Fred already pointed out, it's a hexadecimal point.
>> That aside, they do exist, though they're rare.  While practically
>> everything these days uses IEEE floating-point, which is binary-based,
>> there have been machines with floating-point arithmetic that worked in
>> other bases, like octal or hex.  For them, speaking of the "decimal"
>> point in a number printed in hex notation makes perfect sense.

Well, just wait a second.  Seems to me that years ago (I probably still
have the article), I recall an HP Journal publication that proposed to
represent decimal numbers with a decimal point with a binary integer part
and a fractional part made up of groupings of 10 bits to represent 000-999.
 I don't recall the gist of the perceived advantages.  But one might argue
that this was a case of a hex number with a decimal point.

Cheers,
Chuck