Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Floating Point Programming, Today?

Posted by Cliff on from the learning-new-techniques dept.

An anonymous reader asks: "I'm rather new with programming and stumbled across these twe articles: The Perils of Floating Point from 1996 and What Every Computer Scientist Should Know About Floating-Point Arithmetic from 1991. I tried some of the examples in these articles with Intel's Fortran Compiler and g77 and noted that some of those issue reported no longer seem valid whereas quite a few still very much are around. Could someone, please, give me a pointer to some newer thoughts and/or new facts surrounding floating point programming. What has been improved since those articles were written? What is still the same? How is the future, especially with the new platforms IA64 and AMD64? I am most interested in the x86 and x86-64 architectures. Thank you for your kind help."

5 of 111 comments (clear)

  1. Don't worry by Hard_Code · · Score: 5, Funny

    ...those articles are only 99.99999891 percent true

    --

    It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
  2. Re:Common mistake by AvantLegion · · Score: 4, Funny
    Don't count money as floating point. You'll just have rounding errors.

    But that's the point! And you transfer those fractions of cents (that just get rounded off anyway) into an account you control!

    "back up in your ass with the resurrection...."

  3. Nooooooooo! by Anonymous+Brave+Guy · · Score: 3, Funny

    It's past 1am and some **** is throwing inexact representations and fuzzy logic at me.... This must be a nightmare... Must... wake... up... Aaaaaargh!

    --
    If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
  4. News Flash: Go To considered harmful by bellings · · Score: 5, Funny
    I'm assuming that sometime in the next week one of the slashdot editors will be trolled with an article like:
    I'm rather new with programming and stumbled across the article Go To Statement Considered Harmful from 1968. I tried some of the examples in this article, and noted that some of those issue reported no longer seem valid whereas quite a few still very much are around. What has been improved since the article was written? Will the new 64-bit architectures finally fix all the problems with Go To Statements, or is this something that the hardware designers still need to work on?
    --
    Slashdot is jumping the shark. I'm just driving the boat.
  5. Re:Unsolvable problem by looseBits · · Score: 3, Funny

    Wouldn't it be simpler if humans only had 2 fingers instead of 10. Hell, that's how many I type with anyway.

    --
    Lord, bless my users that they may stop being such fucking idiots!!