Re: Quick inverse square root

[Matt Borchers <mattborchers@gmail.com>]

I never made any claims about the contemporary usefulness of this algorithm.  As I said, I turned a bunch of ugly C into a few lines of pretty Ada for a skeptic.  I'm sure there is no need for this now, but it is still historically interesting.  Trying to make a generic simply started as a thought experiment of how to eliminate the need for the two types (float and modular) which I now concede is impossible in its most generic form.

As computers get faster, storage gets larger, and code libraries get bigger, it is unfortunate that most programmers do not need to be as clever as they once were required to be.

Thanks for finding and sharing the PDF paper!  I'm amazed someone could write so many pages on this.  Out of curiosity, I need to compare my computed magic number with theirs from their 64-bit float example.

Matt