Decimal Data
Some machines have special hardware instructions and native data types specifically designed for dealing with decimal data (of which monetary data is the most common example). IBM's venerable 360/370/390 series of mainframes has an entire instruction set devoted to handling decimal data. A special variable-length data type known as "packed decimal" encodes a decimal value as a series of 4-bit decimal digits (0-9) with each byte containing two digits. Cobol, widely used for data-processing applications on IBM mainframes, makes extensive use of the packed decimal data format and the decimal instruction set to process monetary data.
J.N.A.