While I sympathize with those needing fast floating point operations, it bugs me a great deal more how we're without a decimal literal. Think about the countless financial and engineering institutions (I belong to the latter) and the current verbosity and complexity brought on by BigDecimal in all our algorithms.
When Java was designed, obviously compromises had to be made across the board. But I don't think these things end up as resource issues as much as caused by a painful devotion to backwards compatibility. It may now have become a priorization issue, clearly Sun has moved on from core Java itself and is not in a position financially to "pull all trains", shall be interesting to see what kind of financial result they publish later today. In an interesting forward look in a recent interview, Anders Hejlsberg and Guy Steele imagined that in the future we would perhaps distinguish types on even more parameters than simply precision, i.e. have "cheap floats" which do not consume as many cycles as "expensive floats". That may seem silly today, although with the convergence of small and embedded devices like the iPhone that starts to make some sense. /Casper On Jan 27, 5:22 am, Michael Neale <[email protected]> wrote: > In the latest episode, the "full speed/native math functions" bugbear > of Dick's was mentioned (how Java is IEEE strict which no CPUs are, > which hurts floating point arithmetic and so on badly). > > What was interesting to me was that what was once assumed to be an > ideological objection turns out to be one of resources. > > Does this also applies to other areas - ie the reason some areas go > stale is really just resources but its not until times are really > tough that it is admitted? --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "The Java Posse" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/javaposse?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
