title: How is BCD format used in programming?
body: <p>Excuse me if you find it silly. I am not able to understand the purpose of BCD and its implementation in programming?</p>
  
  <p>What I so far understand about BCD is that it is an internal way of data representation in a byte or a nibble. In a simple C program, we declare variables int, float etc and we manipulate them as we like. Internally they may be represented as binary number or BCD.</p>
  
  <p>Modern calculators use BCD format only. In Intel chips, the instruction <code>FBLD</code> is used to move a packed BCD value into the FPU register.</p>
  
  <p>I have seen few exercises in assembly language programming that convert BCD into decimal and other way round.</p>
  
  <p>How does it help a programmer to know that?</p>
  
  <p>What is the usefulness of the knowledge of BCD to a high-level language programmer?</p>