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I do hope we will get a hardware implementation of decimal now that chipmakers dont k ow what to do with the extra transistors and keep coming up with new vecto
by ClumsyPilot 4y ago
I do hope we will get a hardware implementation of decimal now that chipmakers dont k ow what to do with the extra transistors and keep coming up with new vector instructions, that most developers dont k ow how to ise and most languages don't even supoort
- dahfizz 4y agoWhich decimal? Fixed point, or floating point? Should the numerator and denominator be given the same bit width? How do you deal with overflow and underflow? Its easy to think of "decimal" as one thing because every language provides a library called `decimal`, but there are a million subtle decisions and tradeoffs to make when choosing one standard binary representation. Most languages don't have a binary representation at all, and implement `decimal` as a high level abstraction with regular integers.
- ClumsyPilot 4y agoPick a solution and make a decision just like it was done with every other format. IEEae has defined one, I believe it was mentioned above
- int_19h 4y agoWe managed to standardize on a single binary floating point representation in practice, and even if it's not perfect, the benefit from such standardization makes it worthwhile.