half and quad

[0ffh]

Janice Caron wrote:
> And as for "quad" and "half" - it's not intuitively obvious that these
> are floating point.

Single and double are floats after all. Quad and half fit in nicely.
And the days "when even longs are considered tiny" will probably
never come. Increasing machine word size only makes sense as long
as lots of code needs bigger numbers, which have to be emulated
with multi-instruction mathematical operations.
So quite obviously, 8 and 16 bit were too small. 32 bit word size
is mostly good enough, especially as hardware support for floats
with their own word sizes has become near-ubiquitous. More than 64
bit word size does not pay any more. And I'll probably have my own
quantum computer at home, before I ever own a 256 bit box!

Regards, Frank