Always false float comparisons

[Andrei Alexandrescu via Digitalmars-d]

On 05/16/2016 01:16 PM, Walter Bright wrote:
> On 5/16/2016 6:15 AM, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
>> On 5/16/16 8:19 AM, Walter Bright wrote:
>>> We are talking CTFE here, not runtime.
>>
>> I have big plans with floating-point CTFE and all are elastic: the
>> faster CTFE
>> FP is, the more and better things we can do. Things that other
>> languages can't
>> dream to do, like interpolation tables for transcendental functions. So a
>> slowdown of FP CTFE would be essentially a strategic loss. -- Andrei
>
> Based on my experience with soft float on DOS

I seriously think all experience accumulated last century needs to be 
thoroughly scrutinized. The world of software has changed and is 
changing fast enough to make all tricks older than a a decade virtually 
useless. Although core structures and algorithms stay the same, even 
some fundamentals are changing - e.g. chasing pointers is no longer 
faster than seemingly slow operations on implicit data structures on 
arrays, and so on and so forth.

Yes, there was a time when one setvbuf() call would make I/O one order 
of magnitude faster. Those days are long gone, and the only value of 
that knowledge industry is tepid anecdotes.

Fast compile-time FP is good, and the faster it is, the better it is. 
It's a huge differentiating factor for us. A little marginal precision 
is not. Please don't spend time on making compile-time FP slower.


Thanks,

Andrei