[gumby]

> Floating point is amazingly useful! There's a reason why it's implemented in hardware in all modern computers and why every programming language has a built-in type for floats.

I completely agree with you even though I go out of my way to avoid FP, and even though, due to what I usually work on, I can often get away with avoiding FP (often fixed point works -- for me).

IEEE-754 is a marvelous standard. It's a short, easy to understand standard attached to an absolutely mind boggling number of special cases or explanation as to why certain decisions in the simple standard were actually incredibly important (and often really smart and non-obvious). It's the product of some very smart people who had, through their careers, made FP implementations and discovered why various decisions turned out to have been bad ones.

I'm glad it's in hardware, and not just because FP used to be quite slow and different on every machine. I'm glad it's in hardware because chip designers (unlike most software developers) are anal about getting things right, and implementing FP properly is hard -- harder than using it!