Re: Everything You Know Is Wrong

[Bob Brown <bob@justplainbob.com>]

On 2016-03-02, J-P. Rosen <rosen@adalog.fr> wrote:
> Le 02/03/2016 16:44, Bob Brown a ?crit :
>>> This was a deliberate decision, to make Ada compatible with various
>>> floating point models. Many (most? all?) number crunching machines do
>>> not have IEEE arithmetic, 
>> 
>> Really? Which one(s) are you talking about? I didn't even know there were
>> any number crunchers aside from the sad ones made from a kid's pool full
>> of Intel chips stuck together with tape and glue. All the real stuff like
>> CDC/Cray has been gone for ages.
> Well, true enough, I don't know for recent machines. Even Silicon
> Graphics has disappeared (not so long ago), and AFAIK, they were not IEEE.
>
>>> and there has been famous papers claiming that Java requiring IEEE
>>> arithmetic was a huge mistake. 
>> 
>> I would be interested in seeing the references if you have them at hand.
>> 
> https://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~wkahan/JAVAhurt.pdf

Thanks. I'll check that one out. I'm a little surprised before reading it. I
thought Kahan was the main reason IEEE math exists at all.

Bob

>
>
>
>