C Floating point arithmetic

Garry Wiegand garry at lasspvax.UUCP
Fri Nov 22 05:45:58 AEST 1985


Pet peeve:

In an inauspicious moment, K&R specified "All floating-point arithmetic
in C is done in double precision" (pg 41).

Two effects:

	1) floats, as opposed to doubles, are costly and useless (except 
	   when memory space is critical), and

	2) I have to advise people with CPU-intense problems not to use C.

Comments? Does everybody agree?

garry wiegand

garry%geology at cu-arpa.cs.cornell.edu

(I know what my compiler does, but are char->int and short->int
required in the same way? K&R seems fuzzy to me...)



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