Re: fixed point vs floating point

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

Joe said

<<The great hope of Ada83 fixed-point arithmetic was that it would make such
memos unnecessary.  This would have been a good thing, but it had to wait
for the wide use of floating point.
>>

It would also be a good think if Ada could magically write your program
for you :-)

There is no free lunch when it comes to being careful with fixed-point
scaling. To expect Ada83 to somehow solve this problem automatically
sounds a bit naive, or let's at least say over-optimistic.

<<As for the differences in Ada's model, I don't recall complaints about
that, or that they couldn't understand how it worked.  What I do recall
was that the Ada experts couldn't get it to work reliably or well using
the compilers of the day.
>>

SOunds like you had the wrong "Ada experts" or the wrong compilers, or both.
Many people used fixed-point in Ada very successfully in the early days
(I am really thinking specifically of the Alsys compiler here, since I was
working for Alsys at the time).