Re:0.30000000000000004
by dragontamer on Monday December 02, 2019 @03:42PM
(#21686652)
> Makes me wonder why we haven't switched to a better floating point model in the last decades.
The opposite.
Decimal floating points have been available in COBOL from the 1960s, but seem to have fallen out of favor in recent days. This might be a reason why bankers / financial data remains on ancient COBOL systems.
Fun fact: PowerPC systems still support decimal-floats natively (even the most recent POWER9). I presume IBM is selling many systems that natively need that decimal-float functionality.
Re:0.30000000000000004
by goosehonk on Monday December 02, 2019 @03:45PM
(#21686696)
Decimal floats are a lot older than COBOL. Many early relay computers (to the extent there were many such machines) used floating-point numbers with bi-quinary digits in the mantissa. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bi-quinary_coded_decimal
The opposite.
Decimal floating points have been available in COBOL from the 1960s, but seem to have fallen out of favor in recent days. This might be a reason why bankers / financial data remains on ancient COBOL systems.
Fun fact: PowerPC systems still support decimal-floats natively (even the most recent POWER9). I presume IBM is selling many systems that natively need that decimal-float functionality.