Re:An Interview with the Old Man of Floating-Point (1998)
by bsder on Friday October 29, 2021 @07:49PM
(#29044764)
> Some complaints should be tempered, some others should be flattened into a bare acknowledgement that floating point is simply the wrong tool for the job, e.g. currency.
IBM implemented IEEE 854 Radix-10 floating point (which later got subsumed back into IEEE 754) back in the System z9 days.
In fact, testing currency handling is the only thing that Bitcoin is actually useful for, LOL. If you take Bitcoin, you get smacked with a lot of fractional digits that break your currency system right away if you didn't do it right.
Re:An Interview with the Old Man of Floating-Point (1998)
by infogulch on Friday October 29, 2021 @08:02PM
(#29044845)
That's news to me, apparently 754 was updated in 2008 to include base-10 representations. I didn't even know IEEE standards have revisions at all, multiple mind blows here.
Re:An Interview with the Old Man of Floating-Point (1998)
by zokier on Saturday October 30, 2021 @04:28AM
(#29047080)
Decimal floats are also available in gcc
Re:An Interview with the Old Man of Floating-Point (1998)
by an1sotropy on Friday October 29, 2021 @06:36PM
(#29044305)
good point re currency computations. Support for binary-coded decimal is something that deserves to be improved in modern languages (COBOL had it).
Some complaints should be tempered, some others should be flattened into a bare acknowledgement that floating point is simply the wrong tool for the job, e.g. currency.
Maybe one "complaint" that remains is that floating point is too good and displaces progress in development and support for other number formats that are needed in their neiche like bfloat or fixed point.