On Monday, 16 May 2016 at 10:29:02 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
On 5/16/16 2:46 AM, Walter Bright wrote:
I used to do numerics work professionally. Most of the
troubles I had
were catastrophic loss of precision. Accumulated roundoff
errors when
doing numerical integration or matrix inversion are major
problems. 80
bits helps dramatically with that.
Aren't good algorithms helping dramatically with that?
Also, do you have a theory that reconciles your assessment of
the importance of 80-bit math with the fact that the computing
world is moving away from it?
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3206101/extended-80-bit-double-floating-point-in-x87-not-sse2-we-dont-miss-it
Andrei
Regardless of the compiler actually doing it or not, the argument
that extra precision is a problem is self defeating. I don't
think argument for speed have been raised so far.
