Re: [Gm2] REAL precision

[SiTex Graphics]

Hi Waldek,

Waldek Hebisch wrote:
> Gaius Mulley wrote:
>>   (v)    How about introducing more short library modules, so we have
> This is essentially what GNU Pascal is doing to be compatible
> with legacy code.  I think that this approach works quite well.
>
> I would say that reducing precision of REAL at this time would
> be bad, because there is nontrivial set of programs which would be
> broken by lower precision.

So these programs have been written specifically to work with GM2 and
the convention that REALs have double-precision?

> While this set of programs may be
> smaller than set of programs which run too slow or require too
> much storage due to higher precision I think that possibility of
> breaking programs is much more seriouos than performance problems.

For applications with a small memory footprint and short execution
times doubling storage or longer runtimes might be acceptable.  Users
of our applications are often pushing the limits of available memory
and time available to complete a project.  A new version of our
software with double the memory use and/or degraded performance would
not be acceptable to our users.

-Scott