Editor's Note: This is the first article in a two-part series on decimal representations and decimal arithmetic in general, and on Binary Coded Decimal (BCD) in particular. In this first installment, ...

While desktop computers have tons of computing power and storage, some small CPUs don’t have a lot of space to store things. What’s more is some CPUs don’t do multiplication and division very well.

In the first column of this series, I introduced the concepts underlying BCD (binary-coded-decimal) representations. In my second column I discussed how we go about adding and subtracting unsigned BCD ...