Programmer Humor

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Stop using floats (lemmy.world)

submitted 9 months ago by nifty to c/[email protected]

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[–] davidgro 47 points 9 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.

[–] Kodiack 3 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 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.

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