On Wednesday, 3 July 2013 at 06:18:28 UTC, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
On Wednesday, July 03, 2013 08:11:50 Josh wrote:
Jonathan, do you know of any fixed point D library? If not,
would
it be worth me making one for phobos?
I am unaware of one, and I don't really know why anyone would
really want fixed
point rather than floating point, so I don't know what use
cases it would be
valid for or how much interest there would really be in adding
something like
that to Phobos.
- Jonathan M Davis
Said the man who then went on to state "I really don't like
dealing
with floating point numbers." ;)
That said, fixed point types, and/or "decimal floating point
types" are both very important features to specific domains: Just
the same way certain fields (gaming) have weird requirements, so
do certain other fields.
My brother in law writes financial apps, and in that field, using
floating points type is *legally* forbidden.
My wife writes the embeded code for a machine here company
manufactures. Ditto: no floating point types allowed. She's told
me that their code is *riddled* with things like "mv = v * 1000":
because they don't have a way to handle fractinal numbers.
Long story short, I think both would be a great addition to
phobos/D. I'd personally really want to play with decimal floats:
They are slower, less precise and have less range, but are more
"exact" in base 10 than traditional floats. And when printed in
Base 10, are *always* exact.
