MODIFIED STRAIGHT DIVISION - A COMPUTER IMPLEMENTATION OF MULTIPLE-PRECISION DIVISION

The 'Straight division' algorithm is an in-place division technique th at has been known in India as a mental computation technique. This tec hnique is found to be suitable for implementing multiple-precision div ision on computers using existing single-precision operations. This pa per presents some modifications carried out on this basic technique to improve the efficiency of the algorithm. It also discusses an impleme ntation of multiple-precision division using this modified straight di vision technique on two different processor architectures. This is fol lowed by an analysis of these implementations in comparison with other existing division techniques. It is found that the modified straight division is superior in performance to other known methods.