4 ms·

There are a bunch of different encodings for decimal floating-point. I fail to see how this is the standard that all languages are converging to. IEEE754 norma

There are a bunch of different encodings for decimal floating-point. I fail to see how this is the standard that all languages are converging to. IEEE754 normalizes two encodings, BID and DPD, for decimal32, decimal64 and decimal128 precision presets. This is neither of those. Many libraries use an approach with a simple significand + exponent, similar to the article, but the representation is not standardized, some use full integral types for this rather than specific bits (C# uses 96+32, Python uses a tuple of arbitrary integers). It's essentially closer to fixed-point but with a variable exponent. The representation from the article is definitely a fairly good compromise though, specifically if you're dealing with mostly-fixed-point data.

moron4hire 1y ago
> I fail to see how this is the standard that all languages are converging to. Yes, you are failing to see it because it's not there. Crockford had a hot book amongst junior and amateur JavaScript developers 17 years ago. But he's never really been involved in any language standardization work. Even his self-described "invention" of JSON I wouldn't really call an invention and rather a discovery that one could send JS object literals instead of XML over the wire. This discovery also opened a new class of XSS exploits until browsers implemented JSON.parse. So, when he says "DEC64 is intended to be the only number type in the next generation of application programming languages," it's just the same, old bloviation he has always employed in his writing.
- gwbas1c 1y ago
  I do think DEC64 has merit: Most of the time, I'd prefer to be able to reason about how non-integers are handled; and I just can't reason about traditional floating point. Yes, Doug does bloviate quite a bit. (And when I asked him if there was a way to make callbacks in Node.js / Javascript simpler, he mocked me. A few years later, "await" was added to the language, which generally cleans up callback chains.)
- ramses0 1y ago
  He literally says he "discovered" it!?!?! https://nofluffjuststuff.com/blog/douglas_crockford/2008/01/the_discovery_of_json https://nofluffjuststuff.com/blog/douglas_crockford/2008/01/... ...primary source: """I do not claim to have invented JSON. I claim only that I discovered it. It existed in nature. I identified it, gave it a name, and showed how it was useful. I never claimed to be the first to have discovered JSON. I made my discovery in the spring of 2001. There were other developers who were using it 2000.""" I see value in this semi-simplistic representation of DEC64, and to respond to a peer comment, consider "DEC64-norm", where non-normalized representations are "illegal" or must be tainted/tagged/parsed like UTF-8 before processing. His other "useful" contribution which I lament not seeing anywhere else is "The Crockford Keyboard" another "near-discovery" of existing useful properties in an endemic standard (the English alphabet): https://www.crockford.com/keyboard.html https://www.crockford.com/keyboard.html I really wish that the X-Box onscreen keyboard used this layout! You could imagine that if you could "hot-key" back to the left row (vowels), and have "tab-complete" (ie: shift-tab/tab) it could be a pretty comfortable typing experience compared to the existing "let's copy QWERTY(?!)". ...I feel him as a kindred spirit of pragmatism and complexity reduction (which necessarily) introduces more complexity since we live in a world where complicated things exist. Compared to IEEE floating point numbers, this DEC64 or "Number()" type seems like a breath of fresh air (apart from normalization, as mentioned!).

moron4hire 1y ago

> I fail to see how this is the standard that all languages are converging to. Yes, you are failing to see it because it's not there. Crockford had a hot book amongst junior and amateur JavaScript developers 17 years ago. But he's never really been involved in any language standardization work. Even his self-described "invention" of JSON I wouldn't really call an invention and rather a discovery that one could send JS object literals instead of XML over the wire. This discovery also opened a new class of XSS exploits until browsers implemented JSON.parse. So, when he says "DEC64 is intended to be the only number type in the next generation of application programming languages," it's just the same, old bloviation he has always employed in his writing.

gwbas1c 1y ago
I do think DEC64 has merit: Most of the time, I'd prefer to be able to reason about how non-integers are handled; and I just can't reason about traditional floating point. Yes, Doug does bloviate quite a bit. (And when I asked him if there was a way to make callbacks in Node.js / Javascript simpler, he mocked me. A few years later, "await" was added to the language, which generally cleans up callback chains.)
ramses0 1y ago
He literally says he "discovered" it!?!?! https://nofluffjuststuff.com/blog/douglas_crockford/2008/01/the_discovery_of_json https://nofluffjuststuff.com/blog/douglas_crockford/2008/01/... ...primary source: """I do not claim to have invented JSON. I claim only that I discovered it. It existed in nature. I identified it, gave it a name, and showed how it was useful. I never claimed to be the first to have discovered JSON. I made my discovery in the spring of 2001. There were other developers who were using it 2000.""" I see value in this semi-simplistic representation of DEC64, and to respond to a peer comment, consider "DEC64-norm", where non-normalized representations are "illegal" or must be tainted/tagged/parsed like UTF-8 before processing. His other "useful" contribution which I lament not seeing anywhere else is "The Crockford Keyboard" another "near-discovery" of existing useful properties in an endemic standard (the English alphabet): https://www.crockford.com/keyboard.html https://www.crockford.com/keyboard.html I really wish that the X-Box onscreen keyboard used this layout! You could imagine that if you could "hot-key" back to the left row (vowels), and have "tab-complete" (ie: shift-tab/tab) it could be a pretty comfortable typing experience compared to the existing "let's copy QWERTY(?!)". ...I feel him as a kindred spirit of pragmatism and complexity reduction (which necessarily) introduces more complexity since we live in a world where complicated things exist. Compared to IEEE floating point numbers, this DEC64 or "Number()" type seems like a breath of fresh air (apart from normalization, as mentioned!).