Great article. You really start to appreciate floating point when you have to squeeze some arbitrary level of performance out of an underpowered (say embedded)

Great article. You really start to appreciate floating point when you have to squeeze some arbitrary level of performance out of an underpowered (say embedded) CPU and you decide to use fixed point. Suddenly all those nasty little edge cases that the floating point library would have handled silently, reliably and hopefully correctly for you need to be dealt with. Just keeping track of the shifts during a chain of multiplications and additions can really ruin your day. And the good code will look exactly the same as the bad code. I'm doing something like that right now and have moved from doubles to fixed point 64 bit ints (32.32), it works, but it took me much longer than I thought it would (phase angle estimator for SDR output).