On 5/21/2016 2:26 AM, Tobias Müller wrote:
On Friday, 20 May 2016 at 22:22:57 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
On 5/20/2016 5:36 AM, Tobias M wrote:
Still an authority, though.
If we're going to use the fallacy of appeal to authority, may I present Kahan
who concurrently designed the IEEE 754 spec and the x87.
Actually cited this *because* of you mentioning Kahan several times. And because
you said "The people who design these things are not fools, and there are good
reasons for the way things are."
I meant two things by this:
1. Do the homework before disagreeing with someone who literally wrote the book
and designed the hardware for it.
2. Complaining that the x87 is not IEEE compliant, when the guy that designed
the x87 wrote the spec at the same time, suggests a misunderstanding the spec.
I.e. again, gotta do the homework first.
Dismissing several decades of FP designs, and every programming language, as
being "obviously wrong" and "insane" is an extraordinary claim, and so requires
extraordinary evidence.
After all, what would your first thought be when a sophomore physics student
tells you that Feynman got it all wrong? It's good to revisit existing dogma now
and then, and challenge the underlying assumptions of it, but again, you gotta
understand the existing dogma all the way down first.
If you don't, you're very likely to miss something fundamental and produce a
design that is less usable.
