ECMAScript Version 5 Approved

systembug writes "After 10 years of waiting and some infighting, ECMAScript version 5 is finally out, approved by 19 of the 21 members of the ECMA Technical Committee 39. JSON is in; Intel and IBM dissented. IBM is obviously in disagreement with the decision against IEEE 754r, a floating point format for correct, but slow representation of decimal numbers, despite pleas by Yahoo's Douglas Crockford." (About 754r, Crockford says "It was rejected by ES4 and by ES3.1 — it was one of the few things that we could agree on. We all agreed that the IBM proposal should not go in.")

Comments

Floating point numbers and decimals

[bradley13]

Floating point numbers are a mess if you want to deal with currencies - rounding errors are guaranteed.

That said, look at IBM's 754r standard: unpacking a 128-bit number in chunks of 10-bits? That's got to be the ugliest thing I've seen in a long, long time. A triple-bagger. Implementing that in software will be painfully slow - implementing it in hardware will be a gigantic kludge of dedicated circuitry.

This is an area where ECMAscript pays the price for not being a strongly typed language. The only solution in the ECMAscript framework is to use a decimal library. Awkward, but that's life.

Context

[Anonymous Coward]

What the fuck is ECMAScript?