Floats? (was Re: Wishful thinking)

• Date: Wed, 17 Jan 1996 11:15:52 PST
• From:
  tom@mvision.com (Tom Ritchford)
• Reply-To:
  tom@mvision.com
• In-Reply-To: <9601171237.aa04502@forney.scinc.com> (message from ThwartedEfforts on Wed, 17 Jan 1996 10:34:47 PST)

    I'm very dubious about adding floating point numbers.

Knuth points out that floats are almost never useful unless

a -- You're dealing with really large or really small values (6.023 x 10^23)

b -- You have not taken the time to work out the reasonable
range of output values.

Of course, if you had a MOO that represented the entire universe
you might need it... but I'm sure that there would be a lot of lag
if you had one object per star...

The problem is that floats are slow and can be large.

    /t

Tom Ritchford     tom@mvision.com, tom@weirdos.com

Verge's "Little Idiot" -- Music for the mentally peculiar.
1-800-WEIRDOS           http://www.fly.net/~tom/verge.html

• Re: Floats? (was Re: Wishful thinking)
• From: Christopher Scott Delaney <cdelaney@indiana.edu>

• Re: Wishful thinking
• From: ThwartedEfforts <abakun@scinc.com>

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