On 15.03.2009, at 02:51, Colin Putney wrote:

>  Are floats that important?

For interactive graphics they are, very much, yes, and that is one of  
the major reasons for Squeak to exist.

But even in general, having Float arithmetic is so convenient to  
developers that it crept into many places that don't even really need  
it. In an image that is not that important to you, try making  
Float>>sqrt do "self halt", and then move a window for example.

Or take the OLPC hardware designers - they went for the lowest-power  
chip that had a decent floating point unit (or at least that was a  
major factor) because there is so much software out there that relies  
on float support and that does not perform adequately with emulation.

- Bert -