Re: New Vax - future directions :-)

[Mouse <mouse%Rodents-Montreal.ORG@localhost>]

> A side note: There is a very interesting part of the instruction set
> that I think should be investigated more - the packed decimal
> instructions.

> Those will in fact implement arbitrary precision in hardware,

Only semi-arbitrary - as someone pointed out, only up to 31 digits,
though there's no reason that limit couldn't be raised.

> which could be really nice to have when doing things like crypto
> calculations etc...

Possibly.  I've never looked at doing such things in decimal, much less
packed decimal.  That would be interesting.

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