John Doty: > Karl Hammar wrote: > > So, in what way are floats worse than ints (I'm talking about > > representaion, not about performance) and why could we not "reasonably > > use floating-point"? > The problem is that in engineering documentation, dimensions are > generally given as decimal fractions of inches or meters.
Yes. > Cumulative roundoff error can be avoided if the numeric encoding > can exactly represent such numbers. Yes. > Scaled integers or scaled floating point may be used, Yes. > but scaled integers are a bit easier to use and understand, Yes (but we are talking about internal values, the user don't have to "see" them, only the developers, think of todays "1mm"). > and are usually more efficient. You choose the most efficient one, to do that you test. But I was not talking about performance. > Unscaled binary floating point is troublesome because it cannot > exactly represent most decimal fractions, so it is prone to > cumulative error. Yes. Regards, /Karl Hammar --------- Aspö Data Lilla Aspö 148 S-742 94 Östhammar Sweden +46 173 140 57 _______________________________________________ geda-user mailing list [email protected] http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user
