Date   : Sat, 18 Feb 1984 14:11:00 MST
From   : Kevin Kenny <Kenny%his-phoenix-multics.arpa@BRL.ARPA>
Subject: Re: Turbo Pascal--first impressions

My apologies for flaming; my last message was written fairly late on a
very bad day.  I, too, am primarily interested in getting the job done,
which involves selecting the right tool to do it.

For doing taxes or balancing bank accounts I'd use scaled fixed-point
arithmetic, which gets the pennies right, and not worry about whether
it's decimal or binary internally.  Funny, do you suppose that's why
COBOL was designed that way?

For engineering work, I want floating point sometimes (although the more
you use it, the less you trust it), and (by preference, not necessity)
binary arithmetic.  On nearly all machines, binary is faster; the
analysis of computation errors is easier, too.

For systems programming, I don't give a damn, since it's non-numeric
anyway.

A language trying to serve every application's needs can't do them all
right without falling into the trap of gigantism (_vide_ PL\1).  I think
Turbo has made the right decision, though I recognize that I'm
personally biased toward engineering and away from finance.