Unix History: Why does hexdump default to word alignment?

[Oleg Goldshmidt]

On Thu, Dec 1, 2011 at 12:58 PM, geoffrey mendelson
<geoffreymendelson at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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.

Oh, I know that. I also know a bit about the dangers of floating point
arithmetic.

That job of mine had nothing to do with money though (unlike some of
the subsequent ones).

By the way, eliminating rounding errors is the primary reason why
beasts like Java's BigDecimals exist today. True to its (ugly) form,
Java does not allow operator overloading so BigDecimal arithmetic is
implemented via method calls and even simple formulas look unparseable
by naked eye in code. [Just venting workplace-related frustration
here, sorry... ;-)]

-- 
Oleg Goldshmidt | oleg at goldshmidt.org