Re: fixed point vs floating point

["Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz" <nospam@gsg.eds.com>]

Robert Dewar wrote:
 
> So it is not at all the case that Ada83 should be able to handle fixed point
> arithmetic automatically. Neither Ada 83 nor Ada 95 attempts this. As I noted,
> PL/1 tried, but most people (not all, Robin characteristically dissents :-)
> would agree that the attempt was a failure, 

Most working PL/I programmers would disagree. Strangely enough, PL/I is
like Ada (or any other programming language) in that you will get
unexpected results if you try to program before learning the language.

Periodically the PL/I people have put together task groups to redefine
the way PL/I handles precision and conversion. Invariably they have come
to the conclussion that the current way is better than any of the
proposed alternative.

BTW, very few real programs have constructs like
constant+constant/constant; usually at least one term will be a
variable. Use default precision in the statement

	A = 1 + B/3;

and the "problem" disappears?

Is it perfect? No. But it's no worse than the anomlies in Ada fixed
point, and those are managable.

-- 

                        Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz
                        Senior Software SE

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