davisourus

Some would call it an enjoyable read. Definitely not the typical stodgy format of papers, but addressing the reader and throwing a few jokes in doesn't hurt the technical validity. He wrote it so it could be accessible and defends it as such in the prologue. Dry papers get passed over these days, I'm afraid.

And you could set the environmental variables to be as precise as you need. If you need 29 digits of precision, you can quickly show that you know 1.4142135623730950488016887242 and nothing more.

A reasonable metaphor would be that you cannot draw all of the Mandelbrot diagram, but you can render any piece of it to any resolution you choose. Being able to describe it precisely, and to know the limits of your accuracy, is useful.

If you have 4 GHz of processing IEEE but getting a wrong answer at the end, how do you compare that to a smaller number of FLOPS with a rigorously-bounded answer? I'm not saying they're apples to oranges, I'm saying that you can't just compare the quality of two foods based on calorie count alone.

integer:floatingpoint::floatingpoint:unum

The same way as you store some "meta data" by adding x10^23 to a value of 6.022 ... here you are adding meta data of precision (certainty) and resolving a ton of "NaN" and error issues with IEEE.

This is exactly right - there's an environmental configuration. Think of the way it's ridiculous to play angrybirds with 32 or 64bit precision on your phone, you could set the precision appropriately. Or on the other side, think of how IEEE lops off data from every multiply or divide (any precision) without any point of reference for uncertainty.

Really cool idea. I look forward to using it.