[HN Gopher] An Interview with the Old Man of Floating-Point (1998)
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An Interview with the Old Man of Floating-Point (1998)
Author : rjeli
Score : 53 points
Date : 2021-10-29 19:55 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (people.eecs.berkeley.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (people.eecs.berkeley.edu)
| SavantIdiot wrote:
| Random anecdote: When I built my first 386 box that had a socket
| for a 387, I was super eager to fill that socket because even
| then PC builders were the same as today... but realized there
| wasn't any software that I used which would utilize it (my QuickC
| C-compiler didn't even support it!) The first app I remember that
| used it was Excel. It wasn't till the 486 that commodity games
| started using it.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| Byte magazine !
| dang wrote:
| A couple threads from way back:
|
| _An Interview with the Old Man of Floating-Point (1998)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7769303 - May 2014 (17
| comments)
|
| _An Interview with the Old Man of Floating-Point (1998)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6656197 - Nov 2013 (21
| comments)
| an1sotropy wrote:
| When I teach about floating point, the two things I try to
| impress on the students are: it remains a truly incredible
| engineering feat to believably fit the entire real number line
| (plus infinities) into 32 or 64 bits, and, it was an incredible
| political feat to get so many competing companies to agree on one
| particular way of doing this; both are thanks to Kahan's
| leadership. Complaints about the quirks of using floating point
| could be tempered with some appreciation of the hard design
| decisions that were made, and with gratitude for the people who
| pulled it off.
| FabHK wrote:
| Yes. And one take-away for me: when yet another article comes
| out along the lines of "floating point sucks, and here's a much
| simpler and better replacement", and the author doesn't mention
| Kahan and shows in detail that they understand the design
| tradeoffs and decisions made back then (in IEEE 754), then
| there's a very good chance that you can toss it.
| infogulch wrote:
| True, it's a combo technical and political achievement -- an
| extremely rare feat.
|
| Some complaints should be tempered, some others should be
| flattened into a bare acknowledgement that floating point is
| simply the wrong tool for the job, e.g. currency.
|
| Maybe one "complaint" that remains is that floating point is
| _too good_ and displaces progress in development and support
| for other number formats that are needed in their neiche like
| bfloat or fixed point.
| an1sotropy wrote:
| good point re currency computations. Support for binary-coded
| decimal is something that deserves to be improved in modern
| languages (COBOL had it).
| [deleted]
| wheresmycraisin wrote:
| He taught numerical analysis at Berkeley, and though he was a
| great guy, I think he was waay to smart to be teaching
| undergrads... he'd go off on examples about literally every way
| that things like SVD could go wrong b/c of FP quirks, or how
| Matlab implements thing incorrectly, etc.
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