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I have heard programmers complain about the hellish nightmare of IEEE754 floating-point arithmetic. I'd heard it was a compromise between reliability and implem
by thristian 13y ago
I 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).