On Wednesday, 23 October 2013 at 16:50:52 UTC, Walter Bright
wrote:
Java initially tried to enforce a maximum precision, and it was
a major disaster for them. If I have been unable to convince
you, I suggest reviewing that case history.
It was recently on Hacker News. Here is one of the relevant
rants: http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~wkahan/JAVAhurt.pdf
Page 16 is probably the core argument "Linguistically legislated
exact reproducibility is unenforceable", but everything Kahan
says here is worth listening to (despite the ugly presentation).
