It's hard to comprehend how important and influential Prof. Kahans work on floating-point arithmetic was. The fruits of his work are now everywhere, touching almost everyone's life in one way or another, mostly going unnoticed.
We got through it, but this was not a very smooth innovation. 1 | 8 | 23 is a totally weird bit layout. On the other side, the importance of this to numerical and scientific computation was immense.
Maybe this is what the engineers of the time were thinking. Each digit uses 4 bits (nibble), but then we would not have a fixed number of digits and it would be harder to achieve what was possible with float and double, systems that used a fixed number of bits. I think the key idea that helped adoption was that in engineering they use significant digits anyway... After those digits they do do not care about precision.
It's hard to comprehend how important and influential Prof. Kahans work on floating-point arithmetic was. The fruits of his work are now everywhere, touching almost everyone's life in one way or another, mostly going unnoticed.
These interviews are priceless pieces of history. Thank you for preserving them for future generations.
Thank you for the finite precision that we know today. YES there would be concerns, but that's what we get when we tend TO FIT INFINITY to 64 bits!
We got through it, but this was not a very smooth innovation. 1 | 8 | 23 is a totally weird bit layout. On the other side, the importance of this to numerical and scientific computation was immense.
What about the more precise BCD arithmetic?
I would assume it's much slower.
@@OpenGL4ever It is but a bee's-dick slower.
Maybe this is what the engineers of the time were thinking. Each digit uses 4 bits (nibble), but then we would not have a fixed number of digits and it would be harder to achieve what was possible with float and double, systems that used a fixed number of bits. I think the key idea that helped adoption was that in engineering they use significant digits anyway... After those digits they do do not care about precision.
And to make worse BCD also had different encodings...