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This is always a great read. I think most programmers fail to realize what a hellish nightmare floating-point arithmetic was and still could be if not for the a
by StefanKarpinski 13y ago
This is always a great read. I think most programmers fail to realize what a hellish nightmare floating-point arithmetic was and still could be if not for the amazing work of Kahan and his colleagues and a lot of luck that allowed this standardization process to be one of the most successful ones ever.
- thristian 13y agoI have heard programmers complain about the hellish nightmare of IEEE754 floating-point arithmetic. I'd heard it was a compromise between reliability and implementability, but I hadn't know until know how far it pushed towards reliability, or how much more of a hellish nightmare pre-754 floating point must have been.
- stephencanon 13y ago754 arithmetic is not really hellish; it's quite easy to use correctly if one can be bothered to learn how it works. The trouble that most programmers run into is that they can't be bothered, and assume that it works just like arithmetic over the reals (which they typically don't really understand either).