Alexey Zaparovanny wrote:
> > > I'd like my users to see "60.05", it's not asking that much is it?
> >
> > That is not much for your users but way too much for Palm. Floating point
> management routines can eat up CPU and memory like you
> > wouldn't believe.
>
> I disagree, they ended up with that every serious program now is having
> extra fat for floating point operations.
> I got 6 different programs on my palm 2 of them share MathLib (good thing)
> and 4 using their own floating point routines.
> Where is gain in space or usability ???
It is the way that floating point is handled and managed. Get a hold of any of the
general purpose floating point management
routines and you can see a LOT of code to service every valid permutation. A single
app will use maybe 5% of a general purpose
floating point support lib. This is the same reason why printf() is no fully
supported.
>
> That was not wise from Palm not to include good math built-in in OS. (I
> understand they wanted to be first on the market, but
> Palm is now at least 2 y/o)
And I believe it is still not time. Floating point like MathLib still belongs in the
realm of third party support and not OS.
>
> > This is why all of the early PC's had separate math coprocessors with each
> development environment shipping
> > separate libraries for different floating point types.
>
> That was bad thing. I remember how I struggled too.
Struggling is not the point. The fact is that floating point is used by a small
minority of applications that don't warrant
attention by the OS.
> >
> > And another quote, "It's only a 16 MHz, 68K machine!"
> >
>
> Wait couple more years. (Who needs 640K ?:))
Remember, Moore's Law is no longer valid. Moore assumed unlimited power and if you
take battery consumption into mind, memory
growth and CPU speed will not be as fast. It is now MIPS per Watt now and not MIPS
per second. When the transoptical storage
becomes viable and the CPU processer technology is measured in photo gates, I'll be
more than happy to consider this.
You must remember that "piling the features on" has killed many a PDA in the past.
All of them had floating point support build in
(WinCE, Newton, et. al.) If you are really this hard up, write a floating point
library -- maybe even full printf() support for
floating point, %g is my favorite -- and I'll be one of the first ones to use it. But
please, don't feature creep the OS. This
adds unnessary cost to the baseline in engineer costs and memory usage that will not
be leveraged by the majority of the
applications out there.
Steve
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