Programmer Humor

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Stop using floats (lemmy.world)

submitted 10 months ago by nifty to c/[email protected]

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[–] davidgro 47 points 10 months ago (2 children)

Serious answer: Posits seem cool, like they do most of what floats do, but better (in a given amount of space). I think supporting them in hardware would be awesome, but of course there's a chicken and egg problem there with supporting them in programming languages.

[–] Quetzalcutlass 21 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

Posits aside, that page had one of the best, clearest explanations of how floating point works that I've ever read. The authors of my college textbooks could have learned a thing or two about clarity from this writer.

[–] Kodiack 3 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

I had the great honour of seeing John Gustafson give a presentation about unums shortly after he first proposed posits (type III unums). The benefits over floating point arithmetic seemed incredible, and they seemed largely much more simple.

I also got to chat with him about “Gustafson’s Law”, which kinda flips Amdahl’s Law on its head. Parallel computing has long been a bit of an interest for me I was also in my last year of computer science studies then and we were covering similar subjects at the time. I found that timing to be especially amusing.