were they a stroke of genius or a mistake? and how come no-one ever tried implementing rational numbers in hardware?
Like a long double?
>>107709755Pure genius.
>>107709755rationals are already really fast in software. if you constraint the denominator, all operations become int operations which hardware can already do. This is typically what you do to represent money, e.g : int / 100.ieee754 is really good, but it has some weird features, like subnormals. it's also extremely non trivial to implement transcendental functions like sin, tan, log, atan etc.. because you either have to use higher precision or rely on weird tricks like IBM's math library does.
>>107710266forgot linkshttps://csclub.uwaterloo.ca/~pbarfuss/dekker1971.pdfhttps://www.researchgate.net/publication/220492903_An_accurate_elementary_mathematical_library_for_the_IEEE_floating_point_standard
>>107710266>This is typically what you do to represent money, e.g : int / 100.wrong
