Beman Dawes wrote: [...]
With the C and C++ committee's working on a decimal arithmetic technical report, have you considered how your library will support future decimal types that come out of that effort? Since at least one major vendor (IBM) apparently intends to support the proposed decimal types in hardware, the new types may be a lot faster on some platforms than decimal types which do not have hardware support.
Bewman, wasn't it you who recently asked for clarification about the IBM licencing for decimal? The one and only currently available implementation of the proposed decimal interface is a library that you can use for about $3000. This totally conflits with everything what I've ever heard about standardization, as it's IMHO very difficult to write anything that meets the same interface requirements and doesn't conflict with the current implementation! I myself am not a mathematician, thus I've never been able to seriously propose anything for a very important datatype that I myself use very frequently (I wrote my own decimal implementation some time ago). However, I'm really angry about the dog and pony show to adopt a datatype that goes without saying in other programming languagues. Stefan