14 points by vismit2000 2 days ago | 11 comments | View on ycombinator
AlotOfReading about 2 hours ago |
ashton314 about 1 hour ago |
We use floats as a trade-off between speed and accuracy. IEEE 754 is a very reasonable trade-off for a wide range of applications, but if you can figure out where you need to trade speed to get more accuracy with e.g. one of the methods mentioned here, Herbie's gotcha covered.
I remember seeing some research about switching between formats, but I don't have anything to cite right now.
MiroslavPokorny 2 days ago |
klodolph about 2 hours ago |
Seen it used in a couple places. Logarithmic depth buffer is one. Yamaha DX7 is another.
schiffern 2 days ago |
https://frinklang.org/fsp/frink.fsp?fromVal=new+interval%5B-...
That said, some of these aren't alternatives. Symbolic computation is a different thing entirely. Interval arithmetic can be built atop floats (e.g. IEEE-1788) and has its own zoo of unintuitive behaviors. BCD is better called a historical artifact than an alternative these days.
It's really just rationals and decimal floats in this list, which probably don't solve the issues you have if you're considering float alternatives.