Denser packings of BCD exist which avoid the storage penalty and also need no arithmetic operations for common conversions.
Non-C data type manipulation API—provides access to all of the BCD arithmetic functions as well as a rich set of functions for manipulating date, time, and timestamp data values.
BCD |
Packed BCD is supported in the COBOL programming language as the "COMPUTATIONAL-3" (an IBM extension adopted by many other compiler vendors) or "PACKED-DECIMAL" (part of the 1985 COBOL standard) data type.
•
In the 1972 case Gottschalk v. Benson, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned a lower court decision which had allowed a patent for converting BCD encoded numbers to binary on a computer.
Other people say the name CBASIC referred to "commercial" basic, because it incorporated BCD math which eliminated MBASIC's rounding errors that were sometimes troublesome for accounting.
IBM applied the terms binary-coded decimal and BCD to the variations of BCD alphamerics used in most early IBM computers, including the IBM 1620, IBM 1400 series, and non-Decimal Architecture members of the IBM 700/7000 series.
Xilinx's IP cores include IP for simple functions (BCD encoders, counters, etc.), for domain specific cores (digital signal processing, FFT and FIR cores) to complex systems (multi-gigabit networking cores, the MicroBlaze soft microprocessor and the compact Picoblaze microcontroller).