As a programmer who grew up without a FPU (Archimedes/Acorn), I have never liked float. But I thought this war had been lost a long time ago. Floats are everywhere. I've not done graphics for a bit, but I never saw a graphics card that took any form of fixed point. All geometry you load in is in floats. The shaders all work in floats.

Briefly ARM MCU work was non-float, but loads of those have float support now.

I mean you can tell good low level programmers because of how they feel about floats. But the battle does seam lost. There is lots of bit of technology that has taken turns I don't like. Sometimes the market/bazaar has spoken and it's wrong, but you still have to grudgingly go with it or everything is too difficult.

[–] GroteStreet@aussie.zone 0 points 8 months ago (1 children)

all work in floats

We even have float16 / float8 now for low-accuracy hi-throughput work.

[–] frezik@midwest.social 1 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

Even float4. You get +/- 0, 0.5, 1, 1.5, 2, 3, Inf, and two values for NaN.

Come to think of it, the idea of -NaN tickles me a bit. "It's not a number, but it's a negative not a number".

[–] zaphod@feddit.de 1 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

I think you got that wrong, you got +Inf, -Inf and two NaNs, but they're both just NaN. As you wrote signed NaN makes no sense, though technically speaking they still have a sign bit.

[–] frezik@midwest.social 1 points 8 months ago

Right, there's no -NaN. There are two different values of NaN. Which is why I tried to separate that clause, but maybe it wasn't clear enough.

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