Re: The disturbing myth of Eiffel portability

[Francois Labreque <flabreq@ibm.net>]

dewar@merv.cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar) wrote:
>This *huge* performance hit occurs on fewer and fewer machines, nearly all
>machines now support IEEE arithmetic, and the decision to require this
>semantis in Java represents a final nail in the coffin for weird (and often
>badly designed) non-IEEE arithmetic systems. 
>

I think the original discussion involved "Large US Banks having European 
branches" i.e. The-One-Bank-Where-CJ3-Worked-Therefore-All-Of-Them, and I 
really don't think that we'll see Java-enabled bank machines or terminals 
really soon.  Most of the banks still use COBOL on their mainframes and 
are too busy making their code and databases survive the year 2000 to 
think about Java.

Anyway, I agree with you that unless you deal with the infinitely small 
or infinitely large, gone are the days where you had to substract two 
floats and see if the difference was less than some predefined "tiny" 
value rather than testing them for equality.


-- 
Francois Labreque | "The surest sign of the existence of extraterrestrial
flabreq@ibm.net   |  intelligence is that they never bothered to come and
flab@ca.ibm.com   |  visit us" - Calvin
I may work for them, but i'm not paid enough to speak for them!