on floating-point numbers

[Grant Edwards]

On 2021-09-11, Chris Angelico <rosuav at gmail.com> wrote:

> Once you accept that "perfectly representable numbers" aren't
> necessarily the ones you expect them to be, 64-bit floats become
> adequate for a huge number of tasks. Even 32-bit floats are pretty
> reliable for most tasks, although I suspect that there's little reason
> to use them now - would be curious to see if there's any performance
> benefit from restricting to the smaller format, given that most FPUs
> probably have 80-bit or wider internal registers.

Not all CPUs have FPUs. Most of my development time is spent writing
code for processors without FPUs.  A soft implementation of 32-bit FP
on a 32-bit processors is way, way faster than for 64-bit FP. Not to
mention the fact that 32-bit FP data takes up half the memory of
64-bit.

There are probably not many people using Python on 32-bit CPUs w/o FP.

--
Grant