Precision Tail-off?

[Grant Edwards]

On 2023-02-17, Mats Wichmann <mats at wichmann.us> wrote:

> And... this topic as a whole comes up over and over again, like
> everywhere.

That's an understatement.

I remember it getting rehashed over and over again in various USENET
groups 35 years ago when when the VAX 11/780 BSD machine on which I
read news exchanged postings with peers using a half-dozen dial-up
modems and UUCP.

One would have thought it would be a time-saver when David Goldberg
wrote "the paper" in 1991, and you could tell people to go away and
read this:

  https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19957-01/806-3568/ncg_goldberg.html
  https://www.itu.dk/~sestoft/bachelor/IEEE754_article.pdf

It didn't help.

Every fall, the groups were again full of a new crop of people who had
just discovered all sorts of bugs in the way <software/hardware>
implemented floating point, and pointing them to a nicely written
document that explained it never did any good.

--
Grant