Re:Formatting floating point numbers
by brandmeyer on Friday June 14, 2019 @10:37AM
(#20183344)
Hear, hear!
Sometimes you do need to reliably communicate a floating-point number across a text channel. Hex float is low-risk in the sense that both the encoding and decoding process are much simpler and therefore easier to verify than something that round-trips through decimal. Yes, there are some correct implementations of the decimal<->binary algorithms that round-trip correctly. But there also remain a number of incorrect implementations.
Re:Formatting floating point numbers
by cbsmith on Friday June 14, 2019 @07:29PM
(#20187499)
To be clear: human readable formats when you have humans reading the data makes sense. What is insane is having machines reading & writing human readable formats to talk to each other.
Sometimes you do need to reliably communicate a floating-point number across a text channel. Hex float is low-risk in the sense that both the encoding and decoding process are much simpler and therefore easier to verify than something that round-trips through decimal. Yes, there are some correct implementations of the decimal<->binary algorithms that round-trip correctly. But there also remain a number of incorrect implementations.