[squeak-dev] floats

Ralph Johnson johnson at cs.uiuc.edu
Sun Mar 15 10:43:26 UTC 2009


On Sat, Mar 14, 2009 at 8:51 PM, Colin Putney <cputney at wiresong.ca> wrote:


> Yeah, that's cute... but it seems misdirected to me. Are floats that
> important?

It depends.  They are extremely important for scientific computing,
they are not nearly as important elsewhere.  Most language
implementors ignore scientific computing, which is why Fortran still
gets used so much.

I think it would be reasonable to have an implementation of Smalltalk
that focused on making floating point numbers fast and made integer
arithmetic slower.  For nearly everything that Smalltalk gets used for
now, it would be slower than the current apparoch to optimize integer
arithmetic.  But for real scientific computation, it would be faster.

-Ralph



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