+++ Well said Juan!

Should we purely abandon all these nice features ?
Or hide everything under the VM carpet and not let the "impure" floats reach
the holy image ?
When i read newspeak manifest, that's the negative impression it gives to
me...
...I'm clearly not in the niche market they were focusing.

IMHO Smalltalk just NEEDS some descent floating point capability to remain
the general purpose programming environment it always tried to be.

Nicolas

2009/3/15 Juan Vuletich <juan at jvuletich.org>

> Bert Freudenberg wrote:
>
>> 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 -
>>
>>  Some of the things that require float arithmetic to give best results, or
> to work at all, include jpeg image coding and decoding, mp3 audio coding and
> decoding, video coding and decoding, image scaling (or viewing photos, for
> example), image processing (for photo enhancing, for example), TrueType
> fonts, sound synthesis, audio processing,  voice synthesis, voice
> recognition, 3d modeling and rendering (such as Croquet), zoomeable and
> resolution independent user interfaces, most of the modern effects done by
> window managers, games, simulations... I'm sure this list could be much
> larger.
>
> DSP chips for embedded devices have specialized in doing float arithmetic
> with a good and predictable performance long before Intel included it in
> every desktop.
>
> Floats are a great approximation to the "real" thing (i.e. real numbers) a
> computer can handle, in many cases the best. If the math you're doing
> includes any transcendental functions, or even division, you should consider
> using floats seriously.
>
> I mean, yes, they are "that" important.
>
> Cheers,
> Juan Vuletich
>
>
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