Unix History: Why does hexdump default to word alignment?

[geoffrey mendelson]

On Dec 1, 2011, at 12:51 PM, Oleg Goldshmidt wrote:
>
> I don't recall ever using BCD explicitly, but I may have been too
> inexperienced to notice. Never programmed in Pascal since.


Oleg,

One used BCD for money. I once worked at a place where one of the  
programmers wrote the pension reporting programs for the IBM 370 in PL/ 
I using floating point arithmetic. When people saw the reports and  
noticed that they had strangely rounded balances in their accounts,  
the whole thing was scrapped and re-written using decimal numbers.

Geoff.
-- 
Geoffrey S. Mendelson,  N3OWJ/4X1GM
My high blood pressure medicine reduces my midichlorian count. :-(