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If you look at the ads for microcomputer software, there were a lot of business-related stuff, i.e. AR, AP, etc. Stuff that a kid in public school had no idea w
by canucker2016 2y ago
If you look at the ads for microcomputer software, there were a lot of business-related stuff, i.e. AR, AP, etc. Stuff that a kid in public school had no idea what those acronyms meant.
If you're writing business software, you'll need to support decimals for currency-related calculations. Tax and interest rates also require decimal values. So floating point helped a lot.
When the 8-bit microcomputers went mainstream, (Apple II, Commodore PET, TRS-80), graphics got more popular - sin(), cos(), and other trig functions are popular and their return values are never normally expressed as integer values.
Sure, most would never write a fast arcade-like game in BASIC, but as a code trial playground, turnaround time was relatively quick.
- glonq 2y ago...except that using floating-point values to represent currency was never recommended because of precision issues. Using fixed-point or "integer cents" was preferable.
- hdhdbebd 2y agoI don't understand your argument Especially when doing financial calculations you do not want to use floating point but fix point O_o
- jandrese 2y agoYou want to try to explain fixed point math to someone who is for the first time discovering the concept of a "variable"?
- wizzwizz4 2y agoIt only lets you store whole pennies, not fractions of a penny. This is to help stop rounding errors accumulating, and eventually making a calculation wrong. With fixed point, if you put the formula in right, there will be no surprises.
- HeyLaughingBoy 2y agoThat knowledge was less widespread at the time.
- canucker2016 2y agoExplain fixed-point math to a small-to-medium sized business owner. With signed 16-bit integers (which Apple Integer Basic provided), you've got a range of 32767 to -32768 (wikipedia says Apple Integer Basic couldn't display -32768). But if do the naive fixed-point using 16-bit ints, you'll have a range of 327.67 to -327.68, assuming 2-digit for decimals. 16-bit integers didn't have enough precision for many of those 1970s/1980s use cases. yes, floating-point math has problems. but they are well-known problems - those corner cases were well-known back then.
- vintermann 2y agoI'd rather explain fixed point math to a small business owner than explain to his accountant why pennies keep randomly disappearing and popping into existence.