On Wed, 23 Nov 1994, Mike McNally wrote:
The imprecision in floating point is a factor only if you choose to pay attention to it. It is possible to use floating point all day long to do what are essentially integer calculations. indeed, there have been CPUs (the CDC 6000 series come to mind) that have no integer multiply or divide instruction. Instead, one used the floating point instructions and then extracted the result (carefully) from the mantissa.
Quite so - my mistake. It's been a while since I last looked at FPUs...
Floating point isn't magic, it's just microcode. (Well, not in the CDC 6000 I guess...)
Indeed - Seymour Cray was proud of the fact that his CDC machines did not use microcode - that's what made them so fast. -- Dave Horsfall (VK2KFU) | dave@esi.com.au | VK2KFU @ VK2AAB.NSW.AUS.OC | PGP 2.6 Opinions expressed are mine. | E7 FE 97 88 E5 02 3C AE 9C 8C 54 5B 9A D4 A0 CD