> I've read that, if one is going to use floats, then one should eschew 32-bit floats, and go with 64-bit floats. 80-bit floats seem only useful for very specia

> I've read that, if one is going to use floats, then one should eschew 32-bit floats, and go with 64-bit floats. 80-bit floats seem only useful for very special applications. This is what Kahan has to say on the matter: For now the 10-byte Extended format is a tolerable compromise between the value of extra-precise arithmetic and the price of implementing it to run fast; very soon two more bytes of precision will become tolerable, and ultimately a 16-byte format ... That kind of gradual evolution towards wider precision was already in view when IEEE Standard 754 for Floating-Point Arithmetic was framed (The quote is apparently from 1994 unpublished manuscript, so I can't find the source for it) More than 25 years later and we are rarely using even 80 bit doubles, nevermind 128 bit ones.