On Sep 17, 2008, at 4:48 PM, Sam Ruby wrote: > Maciej Stachowiak wrote: >> On Sep 17, 2008, at 2:34 PM, Douglas Crockford wrote: >>> Sam Ruby wrote: >>> >>>> To the extent that I understand Doug's proposal, it essentially >>>> is an >>>> opt-in that would remove a feature (binary64 floating points); and >>>> therefore would likely be about as successful as an opt-in that >>>> removed another feature that Doug dislikes, such as "with". Am I >>>> missing something? >>> >>> It would replace a feature that many consider to be broken with a >>> feature that >>> we hope will work better. >> While decimal floating point may be better than binary floating >> point for some applications, such as currency calculations, it >> would be unsuitable for other applications such as graphics. Doing >> advanced client-side graphics in JavaScript is an increasingly >> popular application. For example, see Processing.JS, Algorithmic >> Ink, Mozilla's recent image filtering demo, and any of a number of >> charting and graphic applications. >> Using decimal floating point is unacceptable for these kinds of >> applications - the performance would not be acceptable. So we >> should not go down a path based on the assumption that binary >> floating point can be removed. > > If we agree that binary64 isn't a "bug" that needs to be removed, > wouldn't the simplest solution that could possibly work be separate > number and decimal data types that can be freely convertible between > each other, and the absolutely most a "use decimal" could possibly > mean is that the interpretation of numeric literals is as decimal > floating point as opposed to binary floating point?
That approach sounds much better to me than Doug's proposal. >> I agree with you and Brendan that these issues are better resolved >> in Harmony. > > At the minimum, I would hope that we should be able to agree on what > the issues are. If they can't be worked in time, so be it. > > Doug has put forward the proposal that Harmony seek to "wholly > replace the binary representation with the decimal representation". > Is that the consensus of the group? I certainly do not agree with his proposal. Other embers of the group may speak for themselves, but it was not my understanding previously that anyone wanted to go down such a road. - Maciej _______________________________________________ Es-discuss mailing list Es-discuss@mozilla.org https://mail.mozilla.org/listinfo/es-discuss
