Re: [gentoo-amd64] gcc 4.1 + CFLAGS

["Vladimir G. Ivanovic" <vgivanovic@comcast.net>]

On Fri, 2006-06-09 at 10:56 -0700, Bob Sanders wrote:
> If your file system driver is calculating where to place the beginning of a
> file or where to link the tail of one record to the head or the following
> record, one digit mis-calculation could have a bad consequence.  And way,
> way back in the bad old PDP-11 days, file systems did use FP.  I'd
> guess a few modern ones might be using it today.

Blocks, offsets, inodes, and pointers (addresses) are all "integers", so
why would one use floating point? Anyway, floating point is not allowed
in the Linux kernel, and drivers are part of the kernel.

>         
> 
> Also, most financial transactions require a minimum of 4 digits to the right
> of the decimal place.  Again, a single digit error can cause some folks to
> get very, very upset.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floating_point#Accuracy.2C_and_misconceptions_thereof
"...financial software tends not to use a binary floating-point number
representation. The "decimal" data type of the C# and Java programming
languages, and the IEEE 854 standard, are designed to avoid the problems
of binary floating point, and make the arithmetic always behave as
expected when numbers are printed in decimal." 

--- Vladimir

-- 
Vladimir G. Ivanovic <vgivanovic@comcast.net>
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