On 7/2/2014 3:15 PM, Sean Kelly wrote:
On Wednesday, 2 July 2014 at 21:44:17 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
C long double == D real for 32 and 64 bit OSX, Linux, and FreeBSD.
And it's 'double double' on PPC and 128 bit quad on SPARC.
Assuming D targets those platforms, what will be the behavior
there?
Per the D spec, 'real' will be the longest type supported by the native
hardware.
From my perspective, it seems like 'real' in D is utterly
non-portable given its definition. I can see maybe using it in
some cases if I knew I was targeting a specific architecture
where the added precision was helpful, but for general purpose
programming I'd always either use 'double' or some library-based
type for extended precision, simply to have some assurance that
my result would be predictable. Am I wrong in this?
D is a systems programming language. That means it should have access to the
hardware supported types. Portability is not the only goal - especially if that
means "least common denominator". People pay money for more powerful chips, and
they'll want to use them.
Not only that, a marquee feature of D is interoperability with C. We'd need an
AWFULLY good reason to throw that under the bus.
