Floating point design

[LingWitt@insightbb.com]

Make it an option.

On Thursday, Jun 26, 2003, at 18:45 America/New_York, Kevin Ryde wrote:
>
>>
>> Its seems like the floating point should be defined by 3
>> multi-precision integers for the integer portion, decimal portion,
>
> There's never any need to represent those separately, a single value
> suffices.

Even so, having the dynamic growth of the integer would be fantastic.

>
>> and exponent
>
> We believe there's no need for a multi-precision exponent, it would
> only be a slowdown.

Your beliefs are inconsequential. Your slogan "Arithmetic without 
limitations" is sorely hurt.

>
>> since the integer type seems to reallocate itself as necessary
>
> We believe there's no call to reallocate floats, an application will
> want a particular precision and normally after just a few operations
> the full size will be filled with data.

Your beliefs are inconsequential. I have data that needs to expand 
within the limits of the memory.

>
>> Also, why aren't the C++ classes implemented as concrete classes?
>
> See "C++ Interface Internals" in the manual.  You need to read the
> manual before asking the list.

It seems like inline functions would do the trick.