alt Hacker NewsAnd anyone implementing numerical algorithms is thankful for the tremendous amount of thought put into the fp spec. The complexity is worth it and makes the code much safer.
Replies
andrepd • today at 2:48 PM
There was actually no "thought" being put into the IEEE spec as such. It was merely a codification of the design of the Intel FPU (only one of many, very different implementations of FP units pre-standardisation). There was thought put into that implementation, but the "standard" is merely a codification of that design.
It has many many warts, and many design choices were made given the constraints of hardware of that time, not by considerations in terms of a standard.
➕ show 1 reply
imo they were wrong almost as much as they were right. -0.0, the plethora of NaNs, and having separate Inf and NaN all make the life of people writing algorithms a lot more annoying for very little benefit.