<html><head><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html charset=windows-1252"></head><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space;"><br><div><div>On Jun 18, 2014, at 3:05 PM, Bruce Hoult <<a href="mailto:bruce@hoult.org">bruce@hoult.org</a>> wrote:</div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"><blockquote type="cite"><div dir="ltr">On Thu, Jun 19, 2014 at 8:29 AM, Owen Anderson <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:resistor@mac.com" target="_blank">resistor@mac.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><div class="gmail_extra"><div class="gmail_quote">
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><div class="">Numerical analysis is hard. Every numerics expert I have ever worked with considers trying to re-invent floating point a cardinal sin of numerical analysis. Just don’t do it. You will miss important considerations, and you will pay the price for it later.</div>
</blockquote><div><br></div><div>I don't think anyone is planning to use it to write climate models. Or simulate airflow over a 787. Or even invert a near-singular matrix.</div><div><br></div><div>This is for jobs that *could* perfectly well be done with a simple integer with an implied scale factor, if you could easily and reliably predict in advance exactly what scale factor is appropriate for each value.</div>
<div><br></div><div>This simply keeps track of the scale factor for you, so you can't get it wrong.</div></div></div></div></blockquote><br></div><div>If you couldn’t get it wrong, we wouldn’t have had so much difficulty getting the current version to work.</div><div><br></div><div>—Owen</div><div><br></div></body></html>