Re: fixed point vs floating point

[dewar@merv.cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar)]

Joe said

<<It's been at least ten years since use of fixed point in Ada83 came up,
and I no longer recall the details.  I don't think it was lack of
understanding, as we had lots of oldtimers experienced with scaled binary
(most often in assembly, but also in fortran etc) and lots of Ada folk,
some quite good.  Anyway, we gave up on it.  It may have been an
early-compiler effect, later fixed, but the damage was already done.
>>

Actually that's probably a recipe for such misunderstanding. If you come
to the fixed-point semantics in Ada with preconceptions, you can often
be surprised. For example, people do not realize that delta does not
specify the small, or they don't understand the issue with end points
fudged by delta, or they don't understand the role of universal fixed
in multiplication and division, or they don't undersatnd the accuracy
requiremets etc.

So it would not surprise me *at all* if this "damage" were self
inflicted. Using fixed-point in Ada is not like using scaled binary
in Fortran!