Why don't we switch to C like floating pointed arithmetic instead of automatic expansion to reals?

[deadalnix via Digitalmars-d]

On Thursday, 4 August 2016 at 18:53:23 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
> On 8/4/2016 7:08 AM, Andrew Godfrey wrote:
>> Now, my major experience is in the context of Intel non-SIMD 
>> FP, where internal
>> precision is 80-bit. I can see the appeal of asking for the 
>> ability to reduce
>> internal precision to match the data type you're using, and I 
>> think I've read
>> something written by Walter on that topic. But this would 
>> hardly be "C-like" FP
>> support so I'm not sure that's he topic at hand.
>
> Also, carefully reading the C Standard, D's behavior is allowed 
> by the C Standard. The idea that C requires rounding of all 
> intermediate values to the target precision is incorrect, and 
> is not "C-like". C floating point semantics can and do vary 
> from platform to platform, and vary based on optimization 
> settings, and this is all allowed by the C Standard.
>

It is actually very common for C compiler to work with double for 
intermediate values, which isn't far from what D does.