4 ms·
True, it's a combo technical and political achievement -- an extremely rare feat. Some complaints should be tempered, some others should be flattened into a ba
by infogulch 5y ago
True, it's a combo technical and political achievement -- an extremely rare feat.
Some complaints should be tempered, some others should be flattened into a bare acknowledgement that floating point is simply the wrong tool for the job, e.g. currency.
Maybe one "complaint" that remains is that floating point is too good and displaces progress in development and support for other number formats that are needed in their neiche like bfloat or fixed point.
- an1sotropy 5y agogood point re currency computations. Support for binary-coded decimal is something that deserves to be improved in modern languages (COBOL had it).
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- bsder 5y ago> Some complaints should be tempered, some others should be flattened into a bare acknowledgement that floating point is simply the wrong tool for the job, e.g. currency. IBM implemented IEEE 854 Radix-10 floating point (which later got subsumed back into IEEE 754) back in the System z9 days. In fact, testing currency handling is the only thing that Bitcoin is actually useful for, LOL. If you take Bitcoin, you get smacked with a lot of fractional digits that break your currency system right away if you didn't do it right.
- infogulch 5y agoThat's news to me, apparently 754 was updated in 2008 to include base-10 representations. I didn't even know IEEE standards have revisions at all, multiple mind blows here. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_854-1987 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_854-1987
- zokier 5y agoDecimal floats are also available in gcc https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc/Decimal-Float.html https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc/Decimal-Float.html