On Sunday, 13 April 2014 at 18:42:43 UTC, Alix Pexton wrote:
The talk I watched only touched on the motivation for a new
format very briefly, but the gist was that the existing
offerings were too computationally expensive to emulate in
software and hardware support is not forthcoming. My
understanding is that this format is designed around what can
be done efficiently with the instructions that are available in
hardware today.
A...
This would make sense, at least partially, if hardware supporting
the ieee was non-existant, but apparently hardware support for
the decimal64 standard is already here!
Being a numerical analyst I can say I'm extremely interested when
someone comes up with new interesting ideas, but as far as I can
tell we still need to go down a long road before finding
something better than good old floats. And I really think that
one should stick to the standards, as long as the standard is
good enough.
On a side note, I think that support for decimal64 might be
something nice to have in the D language, because apparently that
one is the most used floating point type in the economic sectors.
