[jejones3141]

OK. It looks like the proposed representation represents numbers as a signed 56 bit integer times ten to a signed 8-bit number. That does avoid fiddling with BCD, but it's VERY different from usual floating point. Look at the neighborhood of zero. As with usual floating point there's a gap between zero and the smallest nonzero number... but unlike floating point numbers, the next larger nonzero number is twice the smallest nonzero number. The behavior of numerical methods in DEC64 will, I suspect, be quite different from that of floating point. It would be very interesting to know what the difference is, and I'd hope that proponents of it as "the only number type in the next generation of application programming languages" would exercise due diligence in that and other regards.