"Nick Maclaren" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > The "cheap" means "cheap in hardware" - it needs very little logic, > which is why it was used on the old, discrete-logic, machines. > > I have been told by hardware people that implementing IEEE 754 rounding > and denormalised numbers needs a horrific amount of logic - which is > why only IBM do it all in hardware. And the decimal formats are > significantly more complicated. > > What I don't know is how much precision this approximation loses when > used in real applications, and I have never found anyone else who has > much of a clue, either. > I would suspect that this is one of those questions which are simple to ask, but horribly difficult to answer - I mean - if the hardware has thrown it away, how do you study it - you need somehow two different parallel engines doing the same stuff, and comparing the results, or you have to write a big simulation, and then you bring your simulation errors into the picture - There be Dragons...
- Hendrik -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
