5 ms·

I've worked for a few months on this article as I've learned more about floating point. I hope this helps others gain the same understanding. Please let me kn

I've worked for a few months on this article as I've learned more about floating point. I hope this helps others gain the same understanding. Please let me know of any errors!

rsc 12y ago
Title seems like a blatant rip-off of the classic article.
- haberman 12y ago
  Hmm, it certainly wasn't my intent to be a rip-off. The "What every computer programmer should know about X" seems to be a somewhat established genre, sort of like "X considered harmful": What Every Programmer Should Know About Memory: http://www.akkadia.org/drepper/cpumemory.pdf http://www.akkadia.org/drepper/cpumemory.pdf The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!): http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html Latency Numbers Every Programmer Should Know: https://gist.github.com/jboner/2841832 https://gist.github.com/jboner/2841832 While it's true that an article about floating-point already exists, it does seem more aimed at Computer Scientists than Computer Programmers (as the difference in title would indicate). And I link to the existing article in the second paragraph and explain the distinction. But if it's confusing or seen as disrespectful to the original work, I will consider changing the title.
  - dang 12y ago
    I don't think you need to change the title. It seems obviously an homage to the original, and your second paragraph makes clear why you picked it.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  - unwind 12y ago
    Please consider changing the title, however subtly. I didn't even realize this was new content, so I didn't click the link. I reference the original pretty frequently (it's a standard answer component for floating point-related questions on Stack Overflow), and thought this was confusing as an addition/alternative to that. I'm sure (still haven't read it!) it's very good with a new article aimed more for programmers, just consider making it somehow more clear that it's a different work. Thanks.
  - brazzy 12y ago
    Well, here's my 5 year old attempt to do exactly the same thing: http://floating-point-gui.de http://floating-point-gui.de
    - edwintorok 12y ago
      there's a colon missing in your URL and its not clickable.
    - rurban 12y ago
      I prefer your version by far over the overly verbose and overly simple new haberman guide. Knuth and Goldberg made fantastic and precise overviews, and there is a need to terse it down for programmers, but not too much, down to ground school level.
frozenport 12y ago
Yeah you need to include information about IEEE 754 extended precision formats, 80bits on x86.
Xorlev 12y ago
It's a brilliant article. Reminds me how much I've forgotten since I last manipulated floats and doubles by hand back in architecture class and wrote assembler routines. Thanks for writing it!
CmonDev 12y ago
The content is good but the title is bad.

I've worked for a few months on this article as I've learned more about floating point. I hope this helps others gain the same understanding. Please let me know of any errors!

rsc 12y ago

Title seems like a blatant rip-off of the classic article.

haberman 12y ago
Hmm, it certainly wasn't my intent to be a rip-off. The "What every computer programmer should know about X" seems to be a somewhat established genre, sort of like "X considered harmful": What Every Programmer Should Know About Memory: http://www.akkadia.org/drepper/cpumemory.pdf http://www.akkadia.org/drepper/cpumemory.pdf The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!): http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html Latency Numbers Every Programmer Should Know: https://gist.github.com/jboner/2841832 https://gist.github.com/jboner/2841832 While it's true that an article about floating-point already exists, it does seem more aimed at Computer Scientists than Computer Programmers (as the difference in title would indicate). And I link to the existing article in the second paragraph and explain the distinction. But if it's confusing or seen as disrespectful to the original work, I will consider changing the title.
- dang 12y ago
  I don't think you need to change the title. It seems obviously an homage to the original, and your second paragraph makes clear why you picked it.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- unwind 12y ago
  Please consider changing the title, however subtly. I didn't even realize this was new content, so I didn't click the link. I reference the original pretty frequently (it's a standard answer component for floating point-related questions on Stack Overflow), and thought this was confusing as an addition/alternative to that. I'm sure (still haven't read it!) it's very good with a new article aimed more for programmers, just consider making it somehow more clear that it's a different work. Thanks.
- brazzy 12y ago
  Well, here's my 5 year old attempt to do exactly the same thing: http://floating-point-gui.de http://floating-point-gui.de
  - edwintorok 12y ago
    there's a colon missing in your URL and its not clickable.
  - rurban 12y ago
    I prefer your version by far over the overly verbose and overly simple new haberman guide. Knuth and Goldberg made fantastic and precise overviews, and there is a need to terse it down for programmers, but not too much, down to ground school level.

frozenport 12y ago

Yeah you need to include information about IEEE 754 extended precision formats, 80bits on x86.

Xorlev 12y ago

It's a brilliant article. Reminds me how much I've forgotten since I last manipulated floats and doubles by hand back in architecture class and wrote assembler routines. Thanks for writing it!

CmonDev 12y ago

The content is good but the title is bad.