Subject:
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Re: FW: Something else is needed, I think...
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.robotics
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Date:
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Wed, 5 May 1999 07:36:09 GMT
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Viewed:
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1002 times
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In lugnet.robotics, Kekoa Proudfoot writes:
> stephen p spackman <stephen@acm.org> wrote:
> > But what does it benefit us? *This* is creeping featurism at its worst:
> > FORTRAN has it, so we should too.... In my entire professional life I've
> > never had an application for floating point.
>
> Floating point is easier to use than fixed point for many. Not that I need
> floating point, I can figure out the math and use fixed point. Moreover, I
> can use GCC and Librcx/LegOS and program at the lowest-level too!
>
> My point is that some people - the ones who the byte code is being targeted
> for - want the convenience of floating point. The tradeoff I mentioned
> before was between space and functionality/usefulness. The amount of
> usefulness is fixed; the space is not. If I can write a satisfying set of
> floating point routines in very small amount of space, that might be worth
> including as part of a byte code interpreter.
>
> That's all I'm saying. This is not creeping featurism.
I agree with Kekoa. Floating point is simply an easier paradigm for many of us
to do things that take much more effort and math knowledge to be done with
fixed point. I succeeded in writing a legOS program that performs a lot of
trig math with fixed point (four decimals). I had to write fixed point
versions of sin, cos and arcsin, all of them based on a single table for the
first quadrant of the sin function.
I am really happy with the whole thing, but if I had had FP emulation I'd had
used it! :-)
BTW, with the great help of John A. Tamplin and Marco Beri now I'm able to use
(emulated) floats in my legOS programs. I'm going to post some instructions on
the legOS newsgroup this evening because I understand there are other people
interested in this.
Mario
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Message has 1 Reply:
 | | Re: FW: Something else is needed, I think...
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| (...) So far every discussion I've seen about fixed point math that's gone to any detail to explain the implementation has had it a little off. Usually, trying to impose the decimal system onto your fixed point routines makes them both harder to (...) (25 years ago, 5-May-99, to lugnet.robotics)
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Message is in Reply To:
| | Re: FW: Something else is needed, I think...
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| (...) Floating point is easier to use than fixed point for many. Not that I need floating point, I can figure out the math and use fixed point. Moreover, I can use GCC and Librcx/LegOS and program at the lowest-level too! My point is that some (...) (25 years ago, 5-May-99, to lugnet.robotics)
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