+++ Well said Juan!<br><br>Should we purely abandon all these nice features ?<br>Or hide everything under the VM carpet and not let the "impure" floats reach the holy image ?<br>When i read newspeak manifest, that's the negative impression it gives to me...<br>
...I'm clearly not in the niche market they were focusing.<br><br>IMHO Smalltalk just NEEDS some descent floating point capability to remain the general purpose programming environment it always tried to be.<br><br>Nicolas<br>
<br><div class="gmail_quote">2009/3/15 Juan Vuletich <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:juan@jvuletich.org">juan@jvuletich.org</a>></span><br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
<div><div></div><div class="h5">Bert Freudenberg wrote:<br>
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On 15.03.2009, at 02:51, Colin Putney wrote:<br>
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Are floats that important?<br>
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For interactive graphics they are, very much, yes, and that is one of the major reasons for Squeak to exist.<br>
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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.<br>
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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.<br>
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- Bert -<br>
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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.<br>
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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.<br>
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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.<br>
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I mean, yes, they are "that" important.<br>
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Cheers,<br><font color="#888888">
Juan Vuletich<br>
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