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by adamnew123456
226 days ago
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> Languages for scientific computing like FORTRAN provided multiple floating point types such as REAL and DOUBLE PRECISION as well as INTEGER, often also in multiple sizes. This was to allow programmers to reduce program size and running time. This convention was adopted by later languages like C and Java. In modern systems, this sort of memory saving is pointless. More than that, the idea that anyone would be confused about whether to use integer or floating-point types absolutely baffles me. Is this something anyone routinely has trouble with? Ambiguity around type sizes I can understand. Make int expand as needed to contain its value with no truncation, as long as you keep i32 when size and wrapping does matter. Ambiguity in precision I can understand. I'm not sure this admits of a clean solution beyond making decimal a built-in type that's as convenient (operator support is a must) and fast as possible. But removing the int/float distinction seems crazy. Feel free to argue about the meaning of `[1,2,3][0.5]` in your language spec - defining that and defending the choice is a much bigger drag on everyone than either throwing an exception or disallowing it via the type system. |
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In grad school it was drilled into me to use floats instead of doubles wherever I could which cuts your memory consumption of big arrays in half. (It was odd that Intel chips in the 1990s were about the same speed for floats and doubles but all the RISC competitors had floats about twice the speed of doubles, something that Intel caught up with in the 2000s)
Old books on numerical analysis, particularly Foreman Acton's
https://www.amazon.com/Real-Computing-Made-Engineering-Calcu...
teach the art of how to formulate calculations to minimize the effect of rounding errors which resolves some of the need for deep precision. For that matter, modern neural networks use specialized formats like FP4 because these save memory and are effectively faster in SIMD.
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Personally when it comes to general purpose programming languages I've watched a lot of people have experiences that lead them to thinking that "programming is not for them", I think
is one of them. Accountants, for instance, expect certain invariants to be true and if they see some nonsense like it is not unusual for them to refuse to work or leave the room or have a sit-down strike until you can present them numbers that respect the invariants. You have a lot of people who could be productive lay programmers and put their skills on wheels and if you are using the trash floats that we usually use instead of DEC64 you are hitting them in the face with pepper spray as soon as they start.