On 06.01.21 03:27, Walter Bright wrote:
On 1/5/2021 5:30 AM, Guillaume Piolat wrote:
It would be nice if no excess precision was ever used. It can
sometimes gives a false sense of correctness. It has no upside except
accidental correctness that can break when compiled for a different
platform.
That same argument could be use to always use float instead of double. I
hope you see it's fallacious <g>
...
Evidence that supports some proposition may well fail to support a
completely different proposition.
An analogy for your exchange:
G: Birds can fly because they have wings.
W: That same argument could be used to show mice can fly. I hope you see
it's fallacious <g>
Anyway, I wouldn't necessarily say occasional accidental correctness is
the only upside, you also get better performance and simpler code
generation on the deprecated x87. I don't see any further upsides
though, and for me, it's a terrible trade-off, because possibility of
incorrectness and lack of portability are among the downsides.
I want to execute the code that I wrote, not what you think I should
have instead written, because sometimes you will be wrong. There are
algorithms in Phobos that can break when certain operations are computed
at a higher precision than specified. Higher does not mean better; not
all adjectives specify locations on some good/bad axis.
