News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Yet another alternative to floating-point numbers by carlmr on Sunday November 01, 2020 @02:56AM (#24957895)
It's very common in embedded systems, especially where you need safety and reliability, which are very strongly intertwined with predictability of computation errors.

If you look at ADA, a language made for safety critical systems programming, it has even a very nice abstraction for these:

https://www.adaic.org/resources/add_content/standards/05rm/h...

Re:Yet another alternative to floating-point numbers by w0utert on Sunday November 01, 2020 @06:02AM (#24958663)
Also very common in embedded systems that simply do not have any floating point capabilities at all. For my CS dissertation I had to implement part of an OpenGL pipeline on a VLIW DSP designed for video coding, and all it had was 32-bit integer ALU’s. Dealing with dynamic range was pretty much half of the total effort to map the reference code that used floating point to fixed point with mixed precision.