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Paul Crismer
The Eiffel Decimal Arithmetic library (EDA) is an Eiffel implementation of the » General Decimal Arithmetic Specification (GDAS) version 1.08.
Floating point arithmetic using binary representation does not meet requirements of many application fields like accounting, legal, tax, and more. Many programmers experienced problems using binary floating point arithmetic: loss of accurracy, problems of inexact representation, etc.
Existing databases store a lot of data using decimal representation. Unfortunately, not many languages support decimal arithmetic natively. What's the use of storing decimal data if arithmetic operations do not support this representation?
Thanks to the excellent specification work of Mike Cowlishaw, IBM Fellow, it is now possible to develop a standards-compliant decimal arithmetic library.
By following the GDAS, this Eiffel implementation conforms to the requirements of the ANSI/IEEE standard 854-1987, while supporting integer and unrounded floating-point arithmetic as a subset (see GDAS page 1).
This library works with any Gobo-supported compiler, and has been tested with the compilers listed below.
