Lloyd Zusman wrote:
> Well, the IBM mainframes from the 1960's had decimal arithmetic hardware
> built in.  They could do fixed point (integer), floating point, and
> decimal arithmetic via CPU instructions.
> 
> In fact, they even had several different internal formats for the
> numbers used in decimal arithmetic.
> 
> COBOL and PL/I compilers from back then could use this CPU capability
> directly for calculations.
> 
> Do more modern chunks of Big Iron still have built-in packed and zoned
> decimal arithmetic hardware?
> 
> In any case, the machines that most of us are likely to use these days
> have to do this kind of math in software only.

IIRC, 68K arch has ABCD ("Add Binary-Coded Decimal") and friends.