oh, i thought you meant base 2 as opposed to base 16 (like the 360)
there is a significant performance penalty for bcd arithmetic, so bcd floating point has never been attractive to the customers for floating point: cray buyers, fortran programmers, gamers, analog circuit designers, climatologists
those people don't really care about the beginner issues you mention
but a lot of us are using cpython in jupyter to prototype algorithms we want to run as fast as possible, so we want it to behave like the floating-point hardware does
there is a significant performance penalty for bcd arithmetic, so bcd floating point has never been attractive to the customers for floating point: cray buyers, fortran programmers, gamers, analog circuit designers, climatologists
those people don't really care about the beginner issues you mention
if you're willing to accept a performance penalty in exchange for easier learning, you can implement decimal arithmetic in software; many people have, and it's in the cobol and sql standards and the python standard library. the version i implemented in bubbleos is 83 lines of c, https://gitlab.com/kragen/bubbleos/blob/master/yeso/decimal.... https://gitlab.com/kragen/bubbleos/blob/master/yeso/decimal.... and compiles to about 1.3k of code
but a lot of us are using cpython in jupyter to prototype algorithms we want to run as fast as possible, so we want it to behave like the floating-point hardware does