One day I was writing an Excel macro, and I wanted to hash something (I forget why), and I was looking for a way to compare hashes in a relatively efficient way, meaning storing them in a built-in VBA data type.
Unfortunately, there seemed to be no convenient data type larger than four bytes, except for double precision floating point. I couldn't come up with a way to control all of the bits in a double, and there were no 64-bit integers, but then I discovered an alternative - there is a 64-bit type called "Currency", which is basically a fixed point decimal usable for my purpose.
So, I suddenly realized I'd created a currency system based on hashes...in Visual Basic.
Coincidentally, one of Tom 7's SIGBOVIK 2018 papers [1] actually describes the emulation of uint8_t with floating point operations and nothing else. A working library is available [2].
Unfortunately, there seemed to be no convenient data type larger than four bytes, except for double precision floating point. I couldn't come up with a way to control all of the bits in a double, and there were no 64-bit integers, but then I discovered an alternative - there is a 64-bit type called "Currency", which is basically a fixed point decimal usable for my purpose.
So, I suddenly realized I'd created a currency system based on hashes...in Visual Basic.