DEC 64: Decimal Floating Point by Douglas Crockford

Posted by tosh on Tuesday September 23, 2014 @11:10AM
from the dec64.org dept.

http://dec64.org/

( 8 comments | 12 points | on HN )

Re:DEC 64: Decimal Floating Point by Douglas Crockford by wglb on Tuesday September 23, 2014 @11:43AM (#8355887)

Posted not that long ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7365812 with substantial commentary and criticism.

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Re:DEC 64: Decimal Floating Point by Douglas Crockford by tosh on Tuesday September 23, 2014 @01:13PM (#8356488)

Thanks wglb, seems like the domain changed (even though the .com still works and does not redirect)

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Re:DEC 64: Decimal Floating Point by Douglas Crockford by lowbloodsugar on Tuesday September 23, 2014 @11:48AM (#8355914)

>By giving programmers a choice of number types, programmers are required to waste their time making choices that don’t matter. Even worse, making a bad choice can lead to a loss of accuracy or destructive bugs.

So why not use BigDecimal? It's too slow? So performance is a reasonable selection criterion? But not performance of million ints vs a million DEC64s? o_0

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Re:DEC 64: Decimal Floating Point by Douglas Crockford by shaurz on Tuesday September 23, 2014 @12:16PM (#8356090)

IEEE 754-2008 already has standardised decimal formats: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_floating_point#IEEE_754...

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Re:DEC 64: Decimal Floating Point by Douglas Crockford by dragonwriter on Tuesday September 23, 2014 @12:22PM (#8356133)

Crockford addresses that in passing at the end of the DEC64 page, claiming that IEEE 754's decimal floating point types were too inefficient to garner support.

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Re:DEC 64: Decimal Floating Point by Douglas Crockford by tosh on Tuesday September 23, 2014 @11:11AM (#8355720)

Douglas Crockford talks about why he wants DEC 64 in this talk: http://vimeo.com/97419177 (jump to 41m:20s)

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Re:DEC 64: Decimal Floating Point by Douglas Crockford by nilsimsa on Tuesday September 23, 2014 @11:38AM (#8355863)

This has been brought up before and lots of issues were raised. Including multiple 0s and lack of normalization.

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Re:DEC 64: Decimal Floating Point by Douglas Crockford by taylodl on Tuesday September 23, 2014 @12:09PM (#8356034)

At least with IEEE 754 you can cast as an INT and collate. Putting the exponent in the lowest bits prevents that for DEC64. What were they thinking?

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