sizes of floats, was: +-Inf and NaN

Robert Dodier <[email protected]> Wed, 28 Feb 2024 10:47:27 -0800

Newsgroups	gmane.lisp.gcl.devel,gmane.comp.mathematics.maxima.general
Message-ID	<CAAsY_sTtotkCh=UcY0=JAW82SO8pLY50qeuN6aDq4LLu7XN5Fg@mail.gmail.com>

On Wed, Feb 28, 2024 at 7:40 AM Camm Maguire <[email protected]> wrote:

> Does anyone care about anything other than 4 or 8 byte floats?

I know I don't, also I've never encountered, in 40+ years of numerical
programming, a problem that really needed bigger or smaller ones. I'm
not claiming those problems don't exist; only that they're uncommon to
the point of invisibility.

Creating another float type is taking on a pretty big investment in
implementation and testing. (The first person who says "OH IT'S NO BIG
DEAL" is hereby saddled with the responsibility for it.) Frankly I
don't think the investment is worth the very small expected payoff.

FWIW

Robert