On Saturday, 14 May 2016 at 20:38:54 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
On 5/14/2016 11:46 AM, Walter Bright wrote:
I used to design and build digital electronics out of TTL
chips. Over time, TTL
chips got faster and faster. The rule was to design the
circuit with a minimum
signal propagation delay, but never a maximum. Therefore,
putting in faster
parts will never break the circuit.
Eh, I got the min and max backwards.
Heh, I read that and thought, "wtf is he talking about, never a
max?" :D
Regarding floating-point, I'll go farther than you and say that
if an algorithm depends on lower-precision floating-point to be
accurate, it's a bad algorithm. Now, people can always make
mistakes in their implementation and unwittingly depend on lower
precision somehow, but that _should_ fail.
None of this is controversial to me: you shouldn't be comparing
floating-point numbers with anything other than approxEqual,
increasing precision should never bother your algorithm, and a
higher-precision, common soft-float for CTFE will help
cross-compiling and you'll never notice the speed hit.
