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Re: [Groff] gtroff & soelim don't recognize ~ in paths


From: Miklos Somogyi
Subject: Re: [Groff] gtroff & soelim don't recognize ~ in paths
Date: Tue, 11 Apr 2006 22:53:15 +1000

I couldn't agree more. In many decades of programming engineering
things I never lost sleep about IEEE compliance.
And I don't intend to do CFD in groff, I just don't want to be distracted by
the workarounds of doing floats with integers.

Perl has no integer arithmetic at all. I may sound scary 'cause it is much
more oriented to computations than groff, but it works admirably.
And nobody is up in arms that real numbers are in native machine format.
And they point out that even if everyone sticks to IEEE, there can be another
incompatibility problem around: endianness.
That is not covered in IEEE at all.

Miklos


On 11/04/2006, at 9:26 PM, Tadziu Hoffmann wrote:


E.g. integer arithmetic etc is a relic from an age long
gone, it would be so nice to say good bye to it.

Hmm.  Nelson Beebe would raise a lot of objections.  He
regularly tests floating point packages and implementations
whether they follow the IEEE standards, and there are still
far too many which don't.  Since this has already been
discussed recently I ask you too look up the archive.

But still, people had no qualms about using floating point
arithmetic (CDC, Cray, Vax) before there ever was an IEEE
standard. [*]  And even if some of them might have had a few
nasty features, having floating point at all was better than
not having it.  And with regard to groff, we're talking about
convenience, not precision arithmetic.  If your ...





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