[fpc-devel] General Decimal Arithmetic

[john at johneb47.id.au]

Hi List,
    About 18 months ago I started on writng a General Decimal Arithmetic 
unit/library based on Mike Colishaw's work
<http://www2.hursley.ibm.com/decimal> conforming to IEEE 854-1987 standard.
Sickness prevented me from completing this work and I am now ready to give
it another try. Before I start I would like some sort of feedback from the
list about the viability of this project.

Basically the calling programme would have to pass the following parameters
to the Free Pascal unit:
  1. Rounding type
  2. Number of digits (precision)
  3. SubNormal numbers (boolean)
  4. plus several other parameters depending on the type of the arithmetic 
     and the speed of the operations.

Questions:
   1. Is this type of unit a necessary or useful as part of Free Pascal?
   2. Are these operations presently available within Free Pascal?
   3. Can we do without this capability?
   4. How useful will this unit be in practical applications?
   
Regards

John