DEC 64: Decimal Floating Point by Douglas Crockford (dec64.org)

Douglas Crockford talks about why he wants DEC 64 in this talk: http://vimeo.com/97419177 (jump to 41m:20s)

Posted not that long ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7365812 with substantial commentary and criticism.

>By giving programmers a choice of number types, programmers are required to waste their time making choices that don’t matter. Even worse, making a bad choice can lead to a loss of accuracy or destructive bugs.

So why not use BigDecimal? It's too slow? So performance is a reasonable selection criterion? But not performance of million ints vs a million DEC64s? o_0

At least with IEEE 754 you can cast as an INT and collate. Putting the exponent in the lowest bits prevents that for DEC64. What were they thinking?

IEEE 754-2008 already has standardised decimal formats: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_floating_point#IEEE_754...