this post was submitted on 26 Feb 2024
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Stop using floats (lemmy.world)
submitted 8 months ago by nifty@lemmy.world to c/programmer_humor@programming.dev
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[–] GroteStreet@aussie.zone 9 points 8 months ago (1 children)

all work in floats

We even have float16 / float8 now for low-accuracy hi-throughput work.

[–] frezik@midwest.social 6 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

Even float4. You get +/- 0, 0.5, 1, 1.5, 2, 3, Inf, and two values for NaN.

Come to think of it, the idea of -NaN tickles me a bit. "It's not a number, but it's a negative not a number".

[–] zaphod@feddit.de 6 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

I think you got that wrong, you got +Inf, -Inf and two NaNs, but they're both just NaN. As you wrote signed NaN makes no sense, though technically speaking they still have a sign bit.

[–] frezik@midwest.social 5 points 8 months ago

Right, there's no -NaN. There are two different values of NaN. Which is why I tried to separate that clause, but maybe it wasn't clear enough.