On 15.03.2009, at 13:20, ivan.tomek at acadiau.ca wrote:

> Quoting "Bert Freudenberg" <bert at freudenbergs.de>:
>
>> 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 -
>>
>>
>>
>>
>
> At least some processors used in graphics-based game devices use  
> 'fixed-point arithmetic' instead of floats. These are, in fact, a  
> compromise between integers and floats. Would that be an approach  
> worth looking at?


Not for general use. Those game devices do run very specialized  
software.

- Bert -