| > ('Naming: "algebraic" is not very descriptive of what this does since the operations themselves are algebraic.' :D) Okay, the floating point operations are literally algebraic (they form an algebra) but they don't follow some common algebraic properties like associativity. The linked tracking issue itself acknowledges that: > Naming: "algebraic" is not very descriptive of what this does since the operations themselves are algebraic. Also this comment https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/136469#issuecomment... > > On that note I added an unresolved question for naming since algebraic isn't the most clear indicator of what is going on.
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> I think it is fairly clear. The operations allow algebraically justified optimizations, as-if the arithmetic was real arithmetic.
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> I don't think you're going to find a clearer name, but feel free to provide suggestions. One alternative one might consider is real_add, real_sub, etc. Then retorted here https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/136469#issuecomment... > These names suggest that the operations are more accurate than normal, where really they are less accurate. One might misinterpret that these are infinite-precision operations (perhaps with rounding after a whole sequence of operations).
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> The actual meaning isn't that these are real number operations, it's quite the opposite: they have best-effort precision with no strict guarantees.
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> I find "algebraic" confusing for the same reason.
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> How about approximate_add, approximate_sub? And the next comment > Saying "approximate" feels imperfect, as while these operations don't promise to produce the exact IEEE result on a per-operation basis, the overall result might well be more accurate algebraically. E.g.:
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> (...) So there's a discussion going on about the naming |
(Is this going to overload operators or are people going to have to type this… a lot… ?)