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From: Paul Colin Gloster <Colin_Paul_Gloster@ACM.org>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: Numerical calculations: Why not use fixed point types for
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Date: Fri, 25 Jan 2013 12:23:38 +0000 (UTC)
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Date: 2013-01-25T12:23:38+00:00
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On 2013-01-18, Ada novice <shai.lesh@gmx.com> sent:
|---------------------------------------------------------------------|
|"[. . .]                                                             |
|                                                                     |
|I have read (John Mc Cormick: Building parallel...with Ada's book)   |
|that fixed point arithmetic is faster than floating-point arithmetic |
|since integer instructions are faster so I would ask about the second|
|point put by Adam that mathematical functions are slow with          |
|fixed-point numbers. Can you please elaborate on that?               |
|                                                                     |
|Thanks                                                               |
|YC"                                                                  |
|---------------------------------------------------------------------|

That ceased to be true for (then) new mainstream desktops during the
1990's when Intel Pentiums became popular. Unfortunately people who
create books do not always bother to check if claims they make in them
became out of date during a previous decade. For example, Colin Paul
Gloster, "Book Review: "Optimization Algorithms in Physics"",
"International Journal of Nonlinear Sciences and Numerical
Simulation", June 2010, Vol. 11, No. 6, Pages 387-388.