Decimal computer Decimal computer Decimal computers are computers which can represent numbers and addresses in decimal as well as providing instructions to operate on those numbers and addresses directly in decimal, without conversion to a pure binary representation. Some also had a variable wordlength, which enabled operations on numbers with a large number of digits. Early computers that were exclusively decimal include the ENIAC, IBM NORC, IBM 650, IBM 1620, IBM 7070. In these machines, the basic unit of data was the decimal digit, encoded in one of several schemes, including binary-coded decimal or BCD, bi-quinary, excess-3, and two-out-of-five code. Except for
Fixed-point arithmetic The Ada programming language includes built-in support for both fixed-point (binary and decimal) and floating-point. JOVIAL and Coral 66 also provide both floating- and fixed-point types. ISO/IEC TR 18037 specifies fixed-point data types for the C programming language; vendors are expected to implement the language extensions for fixed point arithmetic in coming years. Fixed-point support is implemented in GCC. Fixed-point should not be confused with Decimal floating point in programming languages like C# and Python. Almost all relational databases, and the SQL, support fixed-point decimal arithmetic and storage of numbers. PostgreSQL has a special numeric type for exact storage of